Go ahead… guess how much…

I hate carrying spare change. This fact will be important in a moment.

In addition to having a new baby in the house, I’m sort of changing job positions. I’m cleaning out my desk and moving from one building in my company to another building in my company. I’ll have slightly different duties, but otherwise everything else is pretty much staying the same.

I’ve been at this same job for four and a half years. During those four and a half years I’ve bought a lot of lunches and plugged a lot of dollar bills into the vending machines. As a result of this, I’ve received back quite a lot of spare change which, as I said, I hate carrying around. So I used to just throw into my desk drawer and forget about it. This continued for about a year before I noticed that each time I opened my desk drawer it sounded very much like the cash register ka-ching of Pink Floyd’s Money.

It was a pleasant reminder of exactly why I was showing up for work each day, but it started to make me feel as though I was working in a toll booth.

At the time I was too lazy to take the spare change home and roll it, so I found an empty Altoids box in the back of my drawer (I have a hard time throwing away anything made of metal, go figure) and tossed some of the extra coins into that. Then I found another one and did it again. Pretty soon I was eating Altoids and generating spare change at about the same pace, so whenever I finished off a box of Altoids (once every other month or so) I’d fill it with change from my drawer and stack it on my shelf.

It is silly office games like this that keep you sane some days.

Now, four and a half years later, I am cleaning out my desk for my move and I have amassed 21 Altoid Boxes filled with spare change. Each box weighs over a pound and each box has about, well… I have no idea how much money in it. Sadly, these boxes are about the only concrete accomplishment I can point to for the entire time I’ve worked at this company.

Instead of moving the 21 Altoid Boxes of spare change, I have elected to dump all the change and start from scratch in my new position.

So that’s what I’ve done. I’ve dumped them right into a coin counting machine at my local bank and come up with the answer to an age-old question:

How much money can be collected in 21 Altoid Boxes filled with spare change?

Answer: $238.90

Now you know.

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It surely began as a Good Idea™.

Some executive somewhere near the top of the food chain noticed that our offices are not very busy during the summer months. He noticed that the building was half empty with employees taking vacation and he couldn’t help but think about all the increased energy costs were were incurring cooling the building and paying the electric bill.

So he suggested we do something that our competition does during the summer: cut back on hours when our company is actually open. Closing the offices one day a week in the summertime would save us thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars! No air conditioning, no lights, no computers! It would more than make up the almost negligible loss of productivity. He had the numbers to support it. We could even pay the employees for the time off as a good will gesture and we’d still save truckloads of cash! It was a no-brainer!

Unfortunately, the Good Idea had to face people for whom “no brain” would be a few rungs up on the intellectual ladder. Like every Good Idea, it was doomed from the start.

You see, the Good Idea had to be brought to a Committee of Executives. Committees of Executives earn their six figure paychecks by beating Good Ideas to death with a stick. At first there was resistance to the idea. Some Executives hated it simply because they didn’t come up with it. Some Executives loved it because they needed to practice their backhand.

There were debates. There was cajoling. There was yelling. There were threats. And, finally, after the flurry of flying fur and feathers fluttered to the floor there sat the twisted, bastard child of the original Good Idea. The child was named Compromise.

And Compromise is always ugly in the corporate world.

The beautiful Good Idea of “closing on one day a week in the summer to save money in energy costs” was long dead. In it’s place was something horrific that I hope none of you ever have to face:

Our office is open every single day during the summer. But now half of our company employeess gets one Friday off, while the other half of the company gets the alternating Friday off. This goes on through the end of the summer, flip-flopping Fridays. But a second part of this plan requires that every department must be open every day during the summer, so each department only has half a staff on every Friday.

This also means that each Friday we only have 50% of the employees in the building. And, on almost every Friday, we have about half of those people who are supposed to be working really out on their own vacation days. That leaves our company with 25% of all its employees disbursed throughout the building.

And that leads us to the ugliness of Compromise: we cool and light our entire multifloored building for 25% of the people every single Friday. Productivity is actually right around zero because there’s not a single project that can be accomplished without the assistance of someone who has the Friday off.

The end result, of course, is some darn fine poker tournaments in the lunchroom, plenty of quiet time for reading and napping and three hour lunches… more than usual, I mean.

So I get every other Friday off work and during the Fridays where I do show up I get paid to do nothing for eight hours while my company burns truckloads of money keeping a large building open.

And you know, I think this plan is actually working. I feel like I’m conserving a lot of energy.

Now let me get back to sleep…

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Today my wife asks me what I do all day at work.

When I was a kid I asked my father the same question once. He was an electrical engineer and he worked in an office all his life. He still does. At the time my father was not able to give me any sort of coherent answer about what he actually DID all day long. It frustrated the 8-year-old me to no end.

I look at my wife. I blink. I have no sensible answer for her. I have become my father. I finally say, “Well… nothing, really.”

And that’s the sad truth of my career now. I go to the office each day with the intention of getting “something” done for my company. But at the end of each day I really can’t say I’ve done anything meaningful or useful or even very interesting in the grand scheme of things. I am living in a Dilbert comic.

So what do I do all day?

I drink coffee. I go to meetings. I answer the phone. I drink more coffee. I write some email. I sometimes solve problems. More often than not I simply refer people to someone else who may be able to help. I drink even more coffee. I chat a lot on IM. I eat lunch. I talk about the other people in my office. I make a lot of witty comments. I go for a walk. I go to more meetings. I surf the web. I read magazines. I drink more coffee. And, thanks to the coffee, I pee…a lot.

True, I don’t always do things in that order, but you get the idea. When I was a child I used to play “office” with my siblings and we’d sit at desks and scribble on papers and staple things together and draw crazy inventions with crayons and generally spend a lot of time doing nothing. Thinking back on those days I realize that I was more productive then than I am now. At least I had some pretty pictures to hang on the refrigerator when I was done playing.

But the older I get, the less this actually bothers me. This is both disturbing and comforting to me at the same time. On the one hand I’m outraged at myself for not wanting to do better and achieve greater goals and change the world. But on the other hand I’m pretty much doing nothing and getting paid for it, so why should I complain?

It’s not a bad existence. It’s not a particularly great one, either. But I am beginning to understand how people just sort of “give up” at my company and don’t even bother trying to make things better. They have more important things to worry about. They have families. And the company is just a “hobby” that happens to pay them.

My father was a great dad. He worked his crappy office jobs so that he could do things with his family. He taught me thousands of things that are so much more important than how to work in an office. He sacrificed a lot of his dreams and opportunities to do things for his kids. I realize that now, twenty years after he did them.

The reason I bring all this up is… I’m going to be a father soon. And I have to wonder if I want to be the sort of father who can tell his child what he does all day. I’m not sure how important that is anymore. I suspect having a child will make me rexamine a lot of my values and thoughts about the world.

Luckily I have eight hours of free time every day to dedicate to it…

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