Same Shit, Different Toilet

I started at my new place of employment this week, sub-contracting at a Client that deals in oil drilling, transporting, and distribution.

My on-boarding was a mess since I was catching the tail end of a Sprint cycle; everyone was hustling to meet their marks. First day, they basically tossed a laptop at me and a gig worth of documentation to read up on.

The place is pretty state-of-the-art. They've got monitors on those adjustable arms so you can position the screens all over the desk at your whim. The desk and chairs both have motorized adjustment mechanisms with four memory settings, I guess in case there are days you feel like sitting high and other days you feel like lying back.

These big blue-chip index companies are pretty damn strict about their policies, particularly in regards to safety and privacy. The first two days comprised primarily of reading these handbooks, and then I had to take these dumb quizzes over the material. I call them dumb because if you answered a question incorrectly, it displayed the correct answer and asked you to try again.

I read the first handbook thoroughly because I didn't want to be "that guy" who failed the on-boarding quizzes, but then I realized that there was no way to fail, so I just clicked through the rest of the material.

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It was mid-week by the time I'd gone through the on-boarding material and was given my laptop, account, and on-line access. I have a buddy, Nick, from high school who I knew was contracting at The Client, but at another building downtown, so the first thing I did was pull up his name on the internal chat messenger and catch up.

The Client licenses this software called WorkPace, which advertises itself as a way to help "achieve safe and healthy work habits." It's basically this process that runs in the background and keeps track of how active you've been at your computer -- how fast your mouse is moving around, how often you're clicking, how fast your keystrokes are -- and tries to remind you to rest if you breach a certain threshold.

The threshold on my machine had been set to 75 words per minute. I easily sustain close to 90 words a minute casually.

Almost as soon as I began chatting with Nick, the little WorkPace panel started popping up, telling me to chill out and take a break. And because of my machine-gun-esque typing, the panel popped up every five or ten minutes, trying to slow me down.

I mentioned this up to Nick, and he told me that he ignores it. That he likes to sometimes type as fast as he can and see if he can make the little smiley face frown.

I thought that was something I'd like to see, so I began chatting and writing e-mails as vigorously as I could. Turns out, the smiley face never frowns. It keeps smiling until it locks your damn machine up and sends a warning message to somebody somewhere, probably telling them that there's a little dick in room C1202 that won't comply to company safety policies.

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Sporadically, these animated windows pop up on the screen with directions for various at-your-seat stretching exercises, and it displays a thirty-second timer to practice it. One of the exercises is to stare at the lower corner of the monitor and allow your eyes to drift, to rest and relax your mind and eyes at the same time.

I've always liked to just let my eyes to wander low and away, not to relax, per se, but because I'm a bit of a sloth and it lets my mind float lazily while looking semi-busy. I always wondered, whenever I did things like that, how all my co-workers always managed to have something to do and were always so diligent about it. I wondered if other people were just moseying around, trying to look busy like I was doing, or if they were actually more productive than me.

Now, I can do it with a guilty-free conscience, knowing that everybody around me has to do it too.