Asleep at the wheel

Who among us hasn’t zoned out during some drone-on work presentation (especially if the lights were dimmed)? Who hasn’t at one time or another tilted back in that office chair – even if it’s not an Aileron – and rested their eyes for just a mo or two. If truth be fully known, many have also no doubt put their little headies down on the desk and taken a well-earned work snooze.

Hey, we work long hours these days.

And everything’s hermetically sealed, so you can’t crack a window open and help yourself to a good, bracing whiff of fresh air.

Plus sometimes work is just so overwhelmingly enervating that we have to grab a few zzz’s in self defense.

So I am so in sympathy with the German bank drone who fell asleep and:

…accidentally held down the number 2 button on his keyboard for a little too long — think 222,222,222.22 — causing that much money (in Euros) to be transferred out of the bank. (Source: Time Newsfeed)

The narcoleptic bank clerk got away with nothing other than a reprimand, but the supervisor who okayed the transaction was fired. She went to court, and got her job back.

The story seems a bit odd, in that, in this day and age, there were no automated checks and balances that clicked into action when this magnitude of money came into play. What bank would rely on the scanning prowess of someone who “had spent less than 1.4 seconds to examine a total of 603 payments”, which was the case of the woman who got sacked.

In any case, what a tedious job.

Scanning a screen all day looking at payments electronically to-ing and fro-ing?

And I thought that I had some boring jobs…

Because, let’s face it, it’s periods of on the job boredom that don’t make you sleepy that are as apt to plague us as any tendency to go nighty-night while it’s still worky-day.

Okay, boredom can surely lead to a little cat napping. But not always. Sometimes catching some shut-eye at work is just not possible, unless you can sleep on your feet.

The most bored I have ever been on the job was when I worked retail, where the boredom can be just skull-crushing.

Retail’s fine when you’re busy, but when it’s not, there are only so many ways you can straighten out the merchandise. And if you work behind an assigned counter – as I did during my retail stints – you can’t even stroll around the racks pretending to be busy.

During my retail career – which entailed working Christmas seasons at Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, Boston emporia long since gone – I was always behind the counter, stationed in stationery. I don’t know if this was because I was obviously the brainy pen-and-ink type, or because I was obviously not the fashionista type who would actually be able to tell a customer that they looked better in the red dress than the orange. No, I was entrusted to pick just the right box of letter paper, and recommend a nice Parker pen to go along with it. But being in stationery meant being stationary, trapped behind the counter all day. By myself, with no fellow sales clerk to gab with if there were no customers in need of a box of Crane’s thank-you notes.

Just as there are only so many times you can straighten out the merchandise, there are only so many times you can extract the square root of your Social Security number in your head.

But, of course, as a sales clerk, you couldn’t plunk yourself down on the tempting little fold-down stool, similar to the ones that used to be in elevators when there was such a thing as a white-gloved elevator operator.  The fold-down stool was next to the cash register, and I have no idea what it was there for, given that you were forbidden to sit down on it. And just in case you were tempted, there was always a White Flower (I think that was at Filene’s) or a Blue Pen (Jordan’s), i.e., a supervisor wearing a white flower or carrying a blue pen, strolling around to keep you, quite literally, on your toes.

I remember standing a my counter trying to make eye-contact with every shopper who strolled by, begging them with my imploring baby-blues to stop by, if only to ask where the umbrellas were, or men’s socks. I didn’t even care if they came by to shoplift. Anything would do!

Boredom was also an occasional problem on the professional front.

Several of the companies I worked for were always in the throes of some re-organization or another, and there’s nothing that stops productive work in its tracks like a looming re-org.

At Dynamics, when one particularly BIG re-org was in the works, it was as if someone had blown a whistle and stopped the assembly line. There was nothing doing. To keep us occupied, one of the VP’s suggested that we meet in groups and come up with our own designs for the brave, new company that we were going to become. My buddies and I made up little slips of paper with everyone’s name on them, took over a conference room, and spent a couple of days creating org charts.

But after a few days of that, I was calling sales people in the field and asking them whether there was anything I could do for them – create “foils” for a new product presentation? go cold-calling? – or for their customers – get on our time sharing system and create some clunky reports in our powerful, and powerfully clunky modeling language, XSIM?

I needed some work!

At Wang, there were also numerous work stoppage spells. But at Wang, boredom was staved off a bit because the company was so large that you could keep yourself occupied working your network, which in those days we didn’t call a network. We called it what it was: a rumor mill.

You’d meet with your morning rumor mill, your lunch rumor mill, and your afternoon rumor mill, all augmented by your e-mail rumor mill. Sometimes one of us would drop a preposterous, entirely made up rumor into the morning mill, just to see how long it would take for it to come back to us as fact. (Not long, as it turned out.)

All of this org-charting, all of this rumor-mongering, was better than straightening out boxes of stationery, but it did get boring after a while, as well.

Still, I don’t remember ever napping while it was all going on. Boring, maybe, but there is always something a bit energizing about rampant kibitzing.

However, it does not beat having real work to do.

But as the German bank clerk and his boss demonstrate, even real work can be soporific, and can lull us into an occasional drowse. Most such drowses don’t result in multi-million dollar errors.

In any case, I’m happy these days to be able to put my head down any old time I want. And with the bedroom just a couple of yards away from the office, when I really need a nap, I just got and take one.