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What do you actually do at work?

renaissance

By renaissance
in The Tailgate

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Ellis

Ellis

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I hate my job. Most days I want to just walk out the door. :ols:

I work for a printing company and aside from putting together the graphic artwork or camera ready artwork, I do almost all of the manual labor involved in printing. The industry is falling apart b/c too much of China has made it into the industry making it impossible to make money as a small printer. The internet has made it difficult to compete as well. Most of our days involve people coming in the door unwilling to spend money, thinking that printing is as free as air. They want high quality at copier prices and don't understand the difference.

We also deal with law firms a lot who need duplicates of their case files literally hours before a court appearance. And they never want to pay the going rate. "oooooooooh, my client would never go for that. We were thinking somewhere along the lines of $xxx for the job." And I always want to reply, "hmmm... yeah, well **** you. You can just take $9K for defending your client rather than $10K." They are a den of viper thieves, I tell you.

And then there are the middlemen who don't actually have equipment to be called an actual "printing company" yet get work done here while my boss blogs all ****ing day about dumb **** involving how bad the economy is with his peers. I've actually said on a number of occasions, "If you did actual work--such as sales, like all those middlemen who come in here--you would see some growth in this company and (gasp!!) the economy just might recover!" I usually get a blank stare when i say this and then he attempts to explain to me how the economy really works. I walk away as he talks and within a few seconds he's back on the blog site talking about things other than running his company... not to mention he shows up an hour after the business opens and leaves an hour early at least 3 days a week. Maybe I'm just jealous or envious of the fact that he does almost nothing all week and makes bank. I would be a liar if I said I hadn't contemplated going into business for myself. I'm too brash for it though. I would have no problem telling someone to get out of my shop if they didn't want to pay the going rate.

Despite all that I hate about my job, I enjoy much of it. I like art and I get to be around it all day. And I have my upright bass here so I play a few minutes at a time when it's slow. I'm also only here b/c it pays well enough and the job is relatively easy while I go to college. There are many hours in a day where I can study so there's a trade off. I hate my job, but I get paid to study. And it's about a block from my house. \m/ And I actually like my boss, he's a cool guy and we give each other a tough time all in good fun. Never once have we argued. I just wish he'd run this place the way he did when he first opened it. He's definitely ready to move on to other things.

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renaissance

renaissance

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I do performance management-related stuff; establish and improve performance plans for our various departments and ensure throughout the year that they are meeting those goals. Day to day, it varies where I am in that process. Usually, though, I'm working with departments to get the data I need, manipulating data in excel to get what I'm looking for, then creating ppt presentations or writing memos about my findings.

Sometimes I have to do research to benchmark a department with their equivalents elsewhere, and we have 1-2 performance meetings per week. When we're not doing performance reviews, we have meetings on various special topics such as why is customer satisfaction with these 5 departments going down, and what can we do to improve it, or why is this department using so much overtime, and how can we reduce that amount.

When I have a meeting coming up or a memo due, I am usually quite busy in excel and ppt. When I'm not close to any deadlines, I'm often posting on ES :), doing background research which will hopefully help me with upcoming projects, and making sure our website is updated.

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Slacky McSlackAss

Slacky McSlackAss

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i sit at my desk drinking coffee, writing code, and posting on the internet while it compiles.
I am a Software Engineer on a DOD project, so it depends where we are in the life cycle of the application.

During development time I probably spend ~6-7 hours coding with scattered meetings in there to add up to 8.

During non development time if I am not helping with a deployment, I probably spend most of my day looking at Redskins / Wizards news with ~2-3 hours of scattered work in there.

Right now, retail sales. In about 5 months I'll be doing the same as above.

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PCS

PCS

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Keep myself busy by walking around the Fieldhouse,(very large rec center. Indoor soccer field and everything),making sure the place is neat,fitness class instructors are taken care of and all those taking the classes are signed in for the class. Check on the weight room area to make sure things are somewhat organized,(yeah right),and of course,customer service,customer service,customer service. Simple job,but it is work. :)

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renaissance

renaissance

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Keep myself busy by walking around the Fieldhouse,(very large rec center. Indoor soccer field and everything),making sure the place is neat,fitness class instructors are taken care of and all those taking the classes are signed in for the class. Check on the weight room area to make sure things are somewhat organized,(yeah right),and of course,customer service,customer service,customer service. Simple job,but it is work. :)

I was expecting you to say something as simple as "clean up sweat and puke"

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Predicto

Predicto

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I'm an attorney who works for the Justices of a supreme court. Supreme courts are courts of discretionary jurisdiction, which means they only take cases that are legally significant and that are "good vehicles" for deciding the issues they raise. So the court has two major functions. One is to decide which cases to take out of the many thousands of petitions recieved every year. The other is to actually decide the cases it takes. I am primarily involved in the first of those two functions and I prefer that part, although I have written opinions for the court in the past. We also get requests for stays, where a party asks us for immediate intervention to stop something that is about to happen in the world in order to give the courts enough time to act. We are the last resort for administrative agency disputes (such as utility regulation or medical licensing). We supervise attorney discipline. And so on.

I have an office piled up with case files. New cases are doled out each week, and I have a limited time to examine them. I review the petitions, analyze the legal issues raised, examine the record, and write a memo to the Justices recommending what to do with the case. Rinse and repeat. Given the size of our state, it would be absolutely impossible for the Justices to examine and analyze each petition themselves, even if there were 100 hours in a day. My memos can be anywhere from 2 to 30 pages, depending on the complexity of the case. The Justices don't have to follow my recommendations, of course. The important thing is to distill out all the extraneous stuff and explain what is legally significant about the matter, and whether or not this is a good case to decide that issue, and how best to handle it procedurally. There are other tasks, but that is the gist of it.

The legal issues I see are cutting edge, and sometimes very complicated, and I work on a short time frame for a very demanding and sophisticated audience. I absolutely cannot bull**** my way through my job. They would spot it in an instant. This is good and bad. No attorney I know gets to look at as many different things as I do or has the freedom to do it as best I see fit. I can leave work in the middle of the day, or come in the middle of the night, it doesn't matter. I have no clients, no phone calls, very few meetings. Only the final work product matters. Sometimes it's a 9-6 job. Sometimes (not often) I am here until 3 in the morning. It all depends on the case.

On the other hand, you can only concentrate so long before your mind turns to mush, and I have no human contact other than wandering down the hall to bounce an idea of a colleague. That is where the Tailgate comes in. I will work on a case for an hour or two, then alt tab over to the Tailgate for ten minutes, then go back to my memo. If I didn't do that, I would go nuts.

Welp, back to work. See you in a couple of hours.

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pjfootballer

pjfootballer

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I just started a new job with Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) a month ago. I'm still training and learning and right now we are at the end of the Fiscal Year. April is when we will start to get busy for the FY2013 which runs from July 1 to June 30. I will be writing contracts and doing contract amendments to provider services for the county. So right now, I spend most of the day watching my co-workers and learning.

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skins_fan1982

skins_fan1982

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I just started a new job with Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) a month ago. I'm still training and learning and right now we are at the end of the Fiscal Year. April is when we will start to get busy for the FY2013 which runs from July 1 to June 30. I will be writing contracts and doing contract amendments to provider services for the county. So right now, I spend most of the day watching my co-workers and learning.

Another procurement/acquisition guy. nice. :) Do you enjoy it so far? Is your background in Contracting?

I used to be a contract specialist down the road from you from you in Richland County (Columbia, SC)

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Dr. Do Itch Big

Dr. Do Itch Big

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I go school but the days I do work I cut lawns. It's not to bad a little taxing buts it's mostly because you are constantly walking for 8 hours. I think it's more boredom more than anything. Pretty mundane but okay pay. The customers can be nice or jerks. Some of them except us to clean up their dogs ****s. I say **** that. They get mad, they try to make us clean it. We say no. They start picking up after their dogs. When working I mostly day dream.

As for the job itself it's basically repeats itself. Cut lawn, do the edges, rake the leaves. Just repeat, occasionally trim bushes. It's simple really.

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pjfootballer

pjfootballer

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Another procurement/acquisition guy. nice. :) Do you enjoy it so far? Is your background in Contracting?

I used to be a contract specialist down the road from you from you in Richland County (Columbia, SC)

Well, I'm only in my 5th week, but so far so good. I used to work for National Systems Mgmt out of Annendale and then at Pax River doing procurement for Missile and Aircraft contracts with the Navy, but that was 13 years ago. I was a Financial Counselor at a hospital and wanted to get back to the procurement field. It's going to take a while to get back into it (you know, the verbage and boilerplate crap), but they are paying me 17K more a year then what I was making, so I'll force myself to like it.:pfft::ols:

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