Making the most of down time at work

Today a glitch in the inner-workings of our comany's phone system crippled my work productivity. Some of my coworkers relish these times, but I normally do not. One of the benefits of work is that it supplies you with tasks, however mundane, so as to occupy your time and alleviate boredom. Had I felt more productive I would have probably found something else to do. There are, after all, other aspects of my job description that do not involve the phone. I could have offered to help someone else, but this would have involved more effort on my part than I really wished to exert on a two-day work week. This time I opted to simply enjoy the hourly paid downtime that life sometimes affords us. I blogged.

I discussed blogs with my sister on our recent trip to Virginia. She said that short and blase blogs were often sub-par because they do not satiate the voyeuristic cravings of those who read them. Since I too prefer to read blogs of people who describe the daily debauchery and drudgery that is their workday, I'll throw in some of my own. I work in a maze of cubicles where people are glued to their monitors and their phones. When I first arrived I found the monotony of the setting outright funny. I knew if I was going to work there though something had to be done. So I decorated.

People now refer to my cube as the tiki hut. I covered the walls with reed fencing from Home Depot to give my cube that island cabana look. I brought in some plants. My supervisor gifted me a hula skirt that I hung up over the bookshelf. I have two inflatables in my cube, a monkey and a palm tree. I fashioned some artwork out of bamboo, box frames and borrowed graphics from the innerweb. On ebay I found some tchotchke that looks like a doll made out of two coconuts. I covered my monitor in leopard print. Two luau-style Chinese lanterns hang from the ceiling and a parrot sits on top of my CPU. Unlike the inflatables the parrot looks real. This is cool until he falls from his perch and it looks like there's a dead bird in my cube.

A coworker and I have decided to start walking to shed off some unwanted pounds. She visited me today and suggested we also keep food journals. I can't see this happening on my end. A food journal reminds me of when I was in elementary school and we had to write down what we ate for our three meals. This exercise was always prefaced by the old adage of breakfast being the most importabt meal of the day . . . blah blah blah. Having to do this always resulted in me lying about my eating habits and instead writing what I thought the teacher wanted me to say. Even as a kid I knew not to admit that I regularly feasted on Reese's peanut butter cups and fistfuls of Honeycomb cereal fresh out of the box. I'm no fool.