Tuesday May 17, 2005

Superhero Tea Breaks

Something I find about support here is that is can be either very busy, or not at all. Since I have gone on to a permanent shift I find it much easier to manage my queue and workload. I never seem to be fighting against a horrendous backlog. This is nice, but on quiet days, what are you supposed to do? I toyed with reading through tech notes for a while, learning new stuff slowly. But I found that to be a waste of my time overall, because I would decide to do it one day and we would suddenly have a busy month where I have no time to do anything other than work. Of course, I forgot everything I had read on the quiet day.

It's certainly a dilemma. I don't want to waste my spare moments of life browsing the internet. Then again, that's assuming that browsing is a waste. There are many interesting sites out there to look at, along with the ones I like to check over regularly as they contain a few personal interests. It would be nice to think I was slowly but surely developing my mind through all this spare time, that's all. I'm sure many of you out there know what I mean. It seems to be a bane of this particular line of work. If I'm working on a project I try not to touch the net because procrastination may set in. It's quite impossible to do that here though, as when a call comes in, you deal with it through to the end as quickly as possible. There is no time wasting. But in those moments (like now) where there are no more calls to take, and you're wating for a customer to e-mail you back with an error log, what can you do? Does anyone out there have favourite sites to check in their spare minutes, or any suggestions of a way to fill in time?