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: : : 001: MY NAME IS MARVIN HOEHN, and I work for Fieldhammer Investments.
002: As a Supervising Data Technician.
003: Mostly I prepare documents to be entered into the company database.
004: What? No, no, it's not that bad.
005: Where'd you hear that?
006: Oh, yeah, he does something different. He's a temp, the temps get the shittier part of the whole deal. They're all in like a, I don't know how you'd describe it, like one big room with different stations in it? They really can't like, slack off.
007: Yeah, totally! [laughs] I have an office.
008: Nah, I share it with one other guy. But he's cool. Most of the time we keep the door closed and play games.
009: Uh, I don't know. Lately we've been playing a lot of Warcraft III.
010: That's not a problem.
011: The company doesn't care as long as I get the shit done that they want me to do.
012: Oh, sure, it's easy. They think that this document prep thing takes way longer than it actually does.
013: I don't know. I think that they think that I'm doing it all by hand.
014: No, no. It's because— [sighs] —people don't know how to use macros. I came in there and by the end of the first day I was like oh, you could do this with a macro. Getting the wildcards to work right was kind of a tricky bit, but now—I push a button and like half of my work is done.
015: Fuck, no.
016: Well, nobody asks. Like I said, all they care about is that the shit gets done; they don't care how I do it.
017: Oh, sure. But, see, there's a trick to it. It's like—they give you a certain amount of work to do in a day, and you do it. If you get done all that work by, say, noon, you don't go hey, I'm done, give me something else to do, because you know that what's going to happen there is soon they'll be expecting you to do twice the amount that you were doing. And that doesn't help anybody.
018: Well, sure, them, but, fuck them, they're rich. [laughs]
019: Right. So, bottom line: you know how much work they want you to do in a day, and if it only takes you a few hours you fill up the rest of the day with stuff you want to do. You do, say, an hour of work when you first get in, an hour right after lunch, and an hour in the afternoon. Maybe you do a little bit more than they expect of you so that you stay in their good graces. Then other days you do a little bit less so that you don't get them expecting too much.
020: The rest of the time, yeah, you spend surfing the web or playing games or whatever.
021: You could very legitimately say that the company employs me to destroy virtual orcs.
: : :
:: Year entries
Index | << | 32 | >>
:: Marvin entries
Index | 1 | >>
Further Reading:
Recent input in the Narrative Technologies weblog:
:: Gangs of New York, World-Building by Dan Hill
[fresh as of 1/21/03]
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