Midnight Pub

On lazyness and growing up...

~ralfwause

While wife and son are visiting the in-laws for a week i have time to visit the pub again... bartender, do you have Grasovka in stock? Yes? Great!

Turning in the general direction to the next patron i start to ramble...

The biggest bane in my life always was my lazyness... but a particular kind of lazyness: If there is a deadline, a release date or an emergency i am hyper productive, i work from 05:00 - 22:00, eat, sleep and jump out of bed fresh as the morning just to head straight to work. But on the other hand... routine work is killing me. Give me a straight good workday without emergencies or big catastrophes and i am doing the bare minimum or even less to just get by. Just today my boss told me "Mr. ralfwause, i am absolutely glad you work here and i hope you will work here in 20 years from now, but sometimes... sometimes i have this urge to simply shoot you...".

Granted... arriving about an hour late and leaving about two early i can somehow put me in his shoes. But there will be the next emergency, there will be the next project that calls to be finished two weeks early... i know it, he knows it and so we co-exist in this gentlemens agreement where he let me slack off while i rescue his backside when the fecal matter hits the atmospheric accelerator...

Now -while finishing my Grasovka- i think i have to go home, i have still to figure out how to be a responsible parent and perhaps it would be nice to video call my wife before sleep... its weird, i finally have the opportunity to sleep undisturbed and relive the glorious single-hacker-days for a week but now the house feels a tad to empty... perhaps this is a sign of finally growing up :-D


starbreaker

I feel seen. Routine bores the undead Christ out of me; I can usually get a solid day's work done in two hours and then I have to spend the rest of the workday performing presenteeism. But when shit gets real I step up and shine.

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ew

Moin ~ralfwause, it is a considerable achievement to have $BOSS wanna shoot you on the spot

:--)))

I keep saying: You know that the guys in the IT dept. are in control if they play compiling or other useless stuff. But don't fall prey to the idea, that fewer of them suffice.

https://xkcd.com/303/

Cheers!

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combatbaby

If there is one gift I could give you it would be the book "Laziness Does Not Exist" by Dr. Devon Price. Your skill set is to perform under high pressure and you need lower expectations in between those peaks. Of course you do! Those pressure cooker situations require a ton of energy. Why do you need to flatten yourself out to meet the consistent valley of a person that is not you? It seems as though your employer takes your skills for granted while perhaps demanding that you ALSO meet expectations outside of that skill set. And it is natural to feel like an imposter or like you should be doing more. I am willing to bet that you are doing enough just as you are.

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xiu

+1 to this. Seasonal effort is supposedly more aligned with how human brains evolved.

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locha

I get the sense that you must be the backbone of your workplace for your employer to accept that deal. By which, I mean: while you think of yourself as a slacker, you're probably the opposite. In fact, you seem to work only when it has meaning---and this is how you can be so productive when the chips are down.

Work's first and foremost role in society is not to produce, but to establish hierarchies. That's why 'slacking off' is frown upon, even where it would improve productivity: it gives you agency outside of your employer's control, and thus challenges the ascendent it has over you. But, in your case, your boss would be much more humiliated without you. I say you're doing really well!!

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