Staring at the wall

I resolved to do nothing but work while at the office today. I failed abjectly, and still was so bored that I was miserable.

Recently there was an e-mail to contractors about Internet security, not badmouthing the client, etc. It reminded us that all our e-mails and instant messages can be read by the government.

We all know that, but this wasn't the usual warning. It wasn't at the usual time, it wasn't phrased the usual way, it read like the sender had something specific in mind. And this was less than a week after this post, which was fairly critical of where I work, and an early draft of that post was even more critical. So the e-mail made me feel more than a little paranoid - oh, shit, I'm caught, I crossed the line! They're on to me! I'm going to get fired!

Between that worry, and my longstanding general sense that I procrastinate too much, I resolved to not do anything I wasn't supposed to with my computer on Thursday. No reading blogs, certainly no following interesting-looking links, no writing posts or getting into discussions on comment threads. I'd get caught up on my projects a bit, I'd respond to things more quickly, and I'd be beyond reproach.

Well, I wrote one post on my personal blog. Brief, to the point, and I didn't sit on it too long or revise too much. Good for me. And I got two personal e-mails, so I responded to them, and I kept those brief too so I'm sure no one could blame me for that. And, well, there's one blog I read that's basically a news Web site, and I often see one of my own supervisors reading it, so that must be safe. I followed one or two links from it, but I was careful to avoid any that looked either too distracting or even remotely potentially NSFW. That can't do too much harm, right? And then there's one more blog, that's not a news site so much as a community, and I got into discussions a little.

Oh hell.

I wound up spending at least a couple hours online on non-work stuff, but I really did reduce non-work stuff enough to make myself very, very bored. After I finished my light workload for the day, I wound up clicking around folders of projects that I couldn't do anything to advance, throwing out old papers and organizing my desk a bit (it's overdue), and almost literally staring at the wall.

My paranoia wasn't even too well-founded. The e-mail mentioned specific stuff, and didn't mention blogging, so if I was the problem they would have left me no doubt. They could have fired me and let word of mouth spread about why, not sent out a mass e-mail and done nothing else for the next few days.

But I wanted to see if I could avoid unauthorized conduct, and I only managed to reduce it, and even that was a real challenge. I tried to "be good" and I failed. Ouch.

I'd like to do more writing in my free time, both to keep in practice with different genres and maybe eventually to do it professionally again, and it seems like writing would be more productive than just reading the Internet from start to finish. The problem is, I have two big ideas, but neither of them are easy to do at work. One idea is a fictional story that's kind of fantasy/horror/fanfic/other stuff. I've been kicking it around in my head since college, and I still think it would be kind of fun to work on, and might even be worth publishing professionally someday. The problem is I haven't been able to get too into it. Maybe I need to try a different approach to writing, but I think it would really help to lock myself to a chair for several hours uninterrupted and write feverishly to get a good start on it, and I can't do that at work. All but the very slowest days have some work to do, and there are frequent interruptions of non-work stuff, and I'd be both self-conscious and legitimately worried about people seeing what I'm doing.

The other idea is the kind of writing I do here - musing and mostly true stories about my work environment. This is potentially Dilbert or Office Space or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy material here. What goes on in this office is often absurd. And it is easy to write about at work, because it's mostly brief anecdotes while they're fresh in my mind. The problem is, I really, really shouldn't write this stuff at work, especially not more critically than I already do, for fear of losing my job.

So maybe I can get started on the fiction stuff at home and bring it to work (even that is a challenge) to polish it, or maybe I can find a writing style on it that works for me at work, but the kind of writing that's easy to do at work is the last kind of thing I should do at work.