Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Slow Day

It always amazes me how I can work 11 hours, get home 5 hours AFTER my son and when I get home, eat, and want to use my laptop that's when he needs it for the next 3 hours to type a paper....but I digress....

It's been slow at work lately.  I hate when it's slow.  I'd much rather have work to do than have to go looking for things to do.  A few months ago I undertook a big overhaul of the filing system to streamline things for everyone but I'm done with that and now the thumb twiddling happens when we aren't busy.  With out crew it can be a little dangerous to leave us idle for too long.  We are a creative bunch and at least two of us are in touch with out inner 12 year old boys.  That can spell trouble.

Today in between waiting for the beep and taking care of the few patients we had I generated several boredom alleviating activities....or at least signs that the schedule is too slow.

  • Painting an entire wall with a white-out and highlighter mural
  • Emulating PeeWee Herman with the scotch-tape (you only need to watch from 2:35-3:09 in the video)
  • Alphabetize the bills in the cash drawer by serial number
  • Create a full line of paper clip jewelry
  • Do this with sticky notes
  • Make wigs out of the paper shredder remnants
  • Using the desk phone as a bola
  • Recreating the pointilist works of Georges Seurat with the holes from the paper punch


Then I thought of staging Chiropractic Office Olympics and all the events
  • The phone book shred (I am the current defending champ here)
  • Chair races
  • The monitor toss
  • The enhanced high jump (enhanced by attaching electrodes for the electro-muscle stim machine to the competitor and giving them a high voltage jolt)
  • File stacking followed by hurdling the stacks
  • Patient launch (using the hydraulic adjusting table as a catapult)
  • 100 meter spider stomp (we are in the woods and seem to be regularly invaded by arachnids)

Of course, on a slow day, there's also the benefit of having time to generate a blog post idea or two....now if I could just work on computer access at home in order to execute the ideas...

Feel free to add some of your own ideas to either list.

16 comments:

silly rabbit said...

I think you have it well covered! I love chair races... that's one we used to do at the school the week before it opened. =:] My library stool was killer!

silly rabbit said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dave said...

Hmm, so its true. Idle hands are the devil's work... Does the boss join in? - Dave

Commander Zaius said...

Feel free to add some of your own ideas to either list.

For any work place Olympics I have always pushed to have professional napping included.

Bijoux said...

Back in the day, you could make crank calls, but caller ID has ruined that fun.

Chickadee said...

LOL I just watched the Post It note experiment. WOW. I suggest using fire extinguishers to power your chair races ;)

Craig said...

In the cube farms in which I have typically worked, the shooting sports are always popular, particularly the long-distance rubber-band event, in which the contestants compete to determine who can hit a fellow-employee with a rubber band from the greatest number of cubicles away. . .

On slow days, when I was younger, we were very creative about coming up with clever competitions involving the tossing of wadded-up sheets of paper (over the fluorescent light, bank off the pillar, into the wastebasket, etc. . .)

Of course, in the current economic milieu, one worries that one's bosses will begin to wonder why they're paying him to shoot rubber bands, etc. . .

Anonymous said...

get some nerf guns and reenact famous gangster movie scenes

Cricket said...

Hmmm... well, let's not forget the xerox self-portrait. Or attempting to reach nirvana by consuming enough coffee to fuel a South American revolution.

When your eyeballs are visibly quivering in your head, you're just about there.

Suldog said...

Sticky notes! That was AWESOME!

There's always the "see who can eat the most stuff from other people's desktop candy dishes" race.

Craver Vii said...

Choir races?? Oh... chair races. Yeah, I guess that would work, too.

secret agent woman said...

So is there any actual work going on at that place?

Craig said...

OK, I'm with Suldog; the sticky-note Slinkys are pretty cool. . . Now I feel really bad that our office only has the kind that all have the glue on the same side, like a pad of checks. . .

(M)ary said...

Hey Chickie: I am blogging again:
http://byefew812.blogspot.com/ (also, I still mean to mail you one of my paintings... I am just procrastinating terribly!)

(M)ary said...

ps...my old blogs were as if you care then ox...now i have a new one.(just in case you forgot who I was !)

Jocelyn said...

OOh, I have always hated having to be at a job when there's nothing to do. It's a weird kind of torture--yet it results in a weird kind of bonding, too, as your list attests.