The House Of Odd

Office dwellers have been searching for ways to avoid work forever. Long before the desktop computer and the internet there was the water cooler gossip, hourly smoke breaks, and the still popular staring off into space.

Today’s sophisticated cube jockey needs an arsenal of options to continuously avoid work at work. Here is a list of a few simple ideas for avoiding work and still giving the impression that you are being productive.

1. Resize browser window over Outlook’s preview pane
Nothing says you are up to no good when your boss walks over to your cube and they catch a quick ‘alt-tab’ swap to hide your browser window. A better way to surf inconspicuously is to resize your browser to a fairly small rectangle and place it in front of Outlook’s preview pane.

Simply keep Outlook open by either maximizing it or taking up 75% of the screen. Then shrink your IE or Firefox window to the same size as the preview pane. To the casual passer-by it appears you are diligently reading email. Keep your mouse pointer hovering over Outlook and be ready to click and bring your email window to the top when you hear footsteps approaching. This is far more subtle than using ‘Alt-Tab’.

2. Use Firefox with Adblock Plus installed
This option is only possible if you have administrator rights to your workstation and you are allowed to installed software without getting permission from the IT department.

Install the Firefox browser and the AdBlock Plus extension. AdBlock Plus does a phenomenal job of preventing just about all of those annoying ads and pop-ups. This can be very helpful when one wants to stealth browse because all of the bright flashy ads are never displayed.

3. Project Gutenberg
This is another way for those banned from the internet to find other means to pass the time. Project Gutenberg has many books available for download and are all free. Downloads are zipped text files which can be easily brought in to work via USB drive or floppy. You could also email it to yourself if there is no way to bring in unauthorized media.

Open the text files in Word or Notepad and spend the afternoon in Dickensian splendor. Hopefully you have an LCD monitor to keep the eyestrain to a minimum.

4. Copy and past web pages from home into Word documents
If surfing the internet is not an option or you are paranoid about being monitored then this may be a good choice. In the morning before work take 5 to 10 minutes to select your favorite news sites or blogs that you’d like to read later during the day. Just open up Word, or any other word processing program, and copy and paste the web page into a Word document and save it to a USB drive. Since the resulting files will be small, often less than 50k, you can also use an old floppy disk if a USB port is not available.

By using Word or Notepad it gives the illusion that the reader is deep in concentration reviewing the latest engineering specs or other ‘mission critical’ literature.

Remove the images to produce a bland official looking document.

5. Bring in games from home on USB drive
Sometimes IT departments can be cruel. It is not unusual for a new tech employees to be issued a PC completely stripped of all forms of entertainment, even the Windows classic, Solitaire.

There is hope, if your office PC is equipped with a USB drive, simply copy your favorite card game to a small thumb drive. Many games can be run directly from the drive and do not require them to be installed to computer’s hard drive.

6. Audio books and Podcasts
Whether it is just rampant paranoia or a super locked-down PC, sometimes there just isn’t any way to avoid work using the computer. There is still hope for those needing entertainment beyond that Excel spreadsheet.

In just about any office you’ll find a percentage of the cube dwellers donning a pair of headphones. Many listen to music, but why not ‘read’ a book. Audio books can be purchased from many different sources on the internet. Most books tend to run from 8 to 15 hours. That’s plenty of material to keep the most determined amused.

If an audio book is out of your price range, there still are podcasts. Podcasts are free and there are thousands out there to choose from. With a little investigation you can fill your iPod with weeks of programming on nearly any subject you can dream of.

Now if some people would put as much effort into their actual work instead of figuring out ways to avoid work they might get that promotion they were hoping for.