I'm a physician.

Next Item: I'm going to go see a patient.
Why it's a waste: They'll end up dying in 50 or 60 years anyway.

;-)

In about half an hour I will begin drafting a speech for my boss which he will be delivering on Monday. He feels he needs to see the first draft by 5pm today.

It will be useless because at 10 am tomorrow there is a big announcement from a third party stakeholder which will significantly affect what the speech should say. Currently we have only the sketchiest of details about the announcement. This will be followed by my having to spend tomorrow afternoon answering for why the first draft was so poorly done.

I'm not sure if this is funny or sad.

Working in sales and regardless of my performance, each day usually starts with the following:

A one hour 'meeting' with the sales manager who tries various combinations of wordplay, mis-interpretation, threats, blackmail and coercion to get me to promise a higher level of sales than is actually coming in.

The day concludes with a one hour 'meeting' with the sales manager who berates me for various combinations of lying, unethical behavior, incompetence, idiocy, and unemployment threats for not meeting the sales goals I 'committed' to earlier in the day.

Logic would dictate that elimination of sales managers would reduce overhead and increase my sales performance by 33%. 15 years and counting as one of the top reps in the company. 14 different 'managers' over the same time period

Well... I'm a software developer but due to budget overruns on the hardware development side, they've scaled back software development. So I'm building lab benches. Yes. Turning a wrench. Even worse, I just realized that the benches I'm building were to support hardware development for a contract that is now canceled. However, if I build benches, I can bill to a non-overhead charge number. They're not willing to confirm this, but I believe that in under 3 months I will be disassembling said benches -- or at least someone will be. Maybe the hardware development team will take a turn.

There are no other humans in the area where I build benches, the HVAC system keeps things uncomfortably warm and we can't have any electronic devices. On the bright side, I'm sick today so I'm taking time off.

I work for an investment bank making software that lets the bank create mortgage backed securities... yeah, the ones that are now "toxic". I'm pretty sure everyone will agree the last 5 years of my life was actively harmful. I didn't see it coming either, but I should have. And I didn't get rich during the good times either.

My current task is a 6 month project to integrate my software into the trading analysis software so the traders can "accurately determine risk of assets".... um, yeah... because we apparently know how to do that now and we didn't before, except the software is going to work the same way it did before.... so I don't see how it will be more accurate now.

Most definitely more sad than funny. My 401k makes me cry :(

My boss, a lawyer, wanted to know if there was any unbilled time for a client who had several different files with him. I checked our accounting software, and brought him statements of unbilled accounts from only those files with unbilled time.

He didn't believe that these were the only files. He requested that I generate reports for each file.

After more than 5 hours, I generated the more than 180 reports, all two pages long, printed them and brought them to my boss, showing no unbilled time.

He didn't even look at them, just told me to shred them.

Then he asks: Why are you behind on ....?

Sigh. Nice guy. No idea how to manage my time properly. I console myself knowing that I get paid either way, but at night, I'm sure I can hear the trees screaming.

Next work item: Enhance and extend a highly-specialised internal developer framework used only by our team.

Why it's pointless: The entire team has been laid off as of April 30.

My boyfriend is posting this for me because I'm a gov't employee and, apparently, a coward.

My next task today is to go back into our electronic timesheet system and change 48 days' worth of electronic timesheets. I will, line by line/day by day, alter the jobcode I used on my timesheets because I was informed today that I charged too many days to one of the 5 jobcodes I use to divide up my time so that no one jobcode from my department is burdened with the full year's cost of me. Each timesheet, consisting of 10 work days, will have to be edited, saved, emailed to my supervisor for electronic approval, and printed out/signed/filed. Because my supervisor works in a different state than I do, I will then sign my hardcopy version, fax it to him, and wait for him to fax back a version with his signature. I will then paperclip that return-faxed timesheet to the printed timesheet that bears my original, ink signature and place it in a folder until my supervisor makes it back to the office (approx. 6 months from now) and we sit down so he can add his original signature next to my original signature on my original hardcopy, and I can at last put all the original, fully-signed timesheets in the box for HR and shred all the fax copies.

This is a waste of time because....you're not really going to make me say it out loud, are you?

I work for a consulting engineering firm designing electrical systems in buildings.

1) My next hour (and the following weeks), I have to circuit a bunch of electrical receptacles to each other in AutoCAD. This "work" consists of drawing arcs between the symbols of each receptacle.

2) It is useless because there is already software called Revit made by the same company as AutoCAD (Autodesk) that handles this process automatically. We have this software installed on our computers. We began this project in AutoCAD, so we have no choice but to continue with the ancient methods. It is also useless because the electrical contractor will end up circuiting most of this stuff how he wants anyway.

The facility we are designing is government-owned, so I am getting paid by the taxpayers indirectly to draw these arcs. And read this blog.

I prepare a weekly revenue forecast for a division of a large, well-known company. I use historical data to produce mathematical trends. I adjust for seasonality. Then I contact the division's sales managers to include any expected large sales that would not be captured by historical data. After 12 hours of work, I submit my detailed forecast to my boss, who tells me to add $10 million to my forecast. He likes "optimistic" forecasts. So I must go back and change all the lines of the forecast to include the extra $10 million. Then I send the forecast to corporate headquarters.

Next week, I will have to write up explanations to corporate HQ as to why my sales forecast was off by $10 million.

Don't tell me I should just add the $10 million to my original forecast. I tried that once, and my boss added $10 million on top of that.

Education biz: I have to scan a textbook, and check the resulting word doc for typos (the scans are inevitably garbled) so that the administration can print their own version. Identical word-for-word, just their own. They're not happy with the textbook coming from a third party because all textbooks must now come from the school's own bookstore.

The class? Sex and Morality. I quit a different white collar job so I could do this, hoping to contribute something philosophical to society.

IT'S JUST THE WAY OF LIFE IN THE COLONY, HONEY ...

The "white collar sector" is all about NO ACTIVITY, punctuated, occasionally, by useless activities -- in order to sustain the illusion that the white collar class is actually doing something productive. For supervising white collar workers and above, one would be lucky to look back on any given week and discover that one had actually done ANYTHING that a reasonable person would describe as "work", let alone something called "useful work".

A company (think any company with over 100 employees) is a bee colony. Regardless of product and apparent structure or organization, the vast majority of North American corporations, upon close examination, will fit with the following description of a bee colony ....

"A honey bee colony (a corporation) is comprised of a queen bee (a CEO), a few hundred male drone bees (the white collar sector), and thousands of female worker bees (the blue collar sector), varies its population in response to food sources (profit margin) and the time of the year (quarterly board meetings and/or shareholder meetings with the bee keeper)."

The white collar sector is not productive. It isn't bred to be productive. It is the 'drone' class ... whose only real purpose is as follows ...

"The drone (white collar worker) is not as large as the queen (CEO), although his wings (corporate reach) are longer and stronger. The drone's function is to mate (stroke/support/reinforce) "on the wing" with the queen (CEO) during her mating flight (flitting about the office). After mating, the drone dies (goes back to his or her office or cubicle). The drone (white collar worker) also has a personal scent (title) that he uses to communicate his needs to the worker bees(blue collar workers). Queens (CEO) on their mating flights are attracted by the scent of the drone (likely Bounce fabric softener). Drones (white collar workers) make a deep, loud buzzing sound (powerpoint presentations, etc) to announce their presence. Drones (white collar workers) do not leave the nest (cubicle/office) to forage and do not feed themselves (i.e. they are non-productive). By using their sense of touch (keyboards and keypads), drones are able to communicate (email, telephone) to worker bees their need for food (productivity, profit, honey)."

The truth shall set you free.

Webster

I'm a tech at a media company. I spent all last night waking up at hour intervals to move mailboxes from a hard drive on the server to another hard drive on the same server, in order to free up some disk space. Disk space is the cheapest thing in the universe now, btw. I'm still working on it at work right now and for the next hour. When I'm done, I'll have reclaimed maybe 20 GB of space. We're doing this because they allow people to have unlimited amounts of mail here, which means people have 2-10 Gigabyte mailboxes.
During on of the moves, I checked one of these ginormous mailboxes out. 10,000 spam messages the manager didn't delete, something like 100 cute videos, etc.
We're doing all of this so the mail server won't crash. We're getting a new mail server in a few months with more drive space. We could fix all of this if we implemented policies that forced people to clean the crap out of their mailboxes, but no - that goes against 'company culture'. I'll be working on this all day, probably.
The first actually useful beneficial thing I do today will be after work, when I take a nice 2 hour walk home through manhattan to unwind and get some exercise.

I'm the chair of fine arts at a middle school. This quarter our big project we did collaborative student composition projects in music, dance and art.

The next thing I will do is create a numerical analysis of the end result showing that students learned.

It's useless because the proof is in the performance.

Numerical analyseis of art is as useful as artistic interpretation of formulas.
(Wait, that was a post here last week.)

I'm a teacher.

The next thing I will do is teach.

Its not useless.

My doctor just told me that my blood test showed I have a bacterial infection in my blood. In medical school, they taught him that, if untreated, this is fatal in less than an hour. My blood test was done 3 months ago. (He was not allowed to tell me the test results at the time because of some health care law that requires informing patients of test results to be done by the primary care physician, and the PCP dropped the ball.)

He said that he's seen an increasing number of patients with persistent blood infections, and that nobody understands why they aren't dead, and that it's a disgrace that nobody has yet sequenced the DNA of these microorganisms to find out what they are.

Coincidentally, I work for one of the genomic research centers that has part of the government grant to sequence the DNA of microorganisms found in the human body.

So I'm going to talk to the program's manager and try to convince her to get a sample and sequence it, and possibly save my life, because it needs to be done and we have the grant that it's supposed to be done under.

And she's very likely going to tell me that they can't because blood is not one of the environmental niches listed in the project, so they wouldn't be able to get a charge code for it; and because I'm not listed in the contract as a sample provider.

I think I can win this game....

I am a software developer. About 10 years ago I wrote a database system to keep track of various information about employees for our Human Resources department. This year they decided to switch to a $250K off-the-shelf (plus almost 6 months of consultant fees) ERP system to replace the venerable system I had built for them. As the go-live date for the new super-expensive system neared, HR decided that they didn't like the user interface.

So tomorrow I will be working on writing a custom UI that will export data files that can be imported into the new ERP system that is replacing the custom UI that I previously built and had been working for the company for 10 years.

PS: I hear they have another developer working on a synchronization module to shuttle the data back and forth between the back end of the new ERP system and the back end of my old system. So essentially they are paying myself and other developers to re-build the exact same system the have now wrapped around a new costly ERP system.

Send my prize to PO Box....

Now, a more interesting follow up question would be: "what could you do instead that would make a difference in the long run?"

I will probably spend the next hour or so explaining to customers that we are very sorry for the hardware failures that we had in our datacenter yesterday and that our vendor is really at fault. Then I will say lots of re-assuring things to convince them it won't happen again, even though we don't understand the problem and it probably will happen again and we all know it.

I am fairly sure this has no value. Do you know of any available carpentry job?