The Average Day of an IT Worker

Here’s an effective guide for how the average IT slave/drone/worker can get through the day. Some may religiously use it as a step by step guide, others may relate to it but whatever it is, there’s plenty of truth in the following…

1. Arrive to work 30 mins late, no less. Go in back entrance so as to avoid ‘idiot with a question’ (Note: Every company employs ‘idiots with questions’ or IWAQ’s, there is no avoiding them as they make up approximately 95% of the staff, more on these cunning individuals below)
2. Take laptop out of bag
3. Dock laptop, turn on power, offer a sacrifice from some useless CD promotional materials (aka spam) and pray that no BSOD occurs
4. Thank the silicon gods that no BSOD occurred
5. ‘Idiot with a question’ tracks you down and interrupts you with some irrelevant printer problem which you’ve showed them how to fix at least 8 times before, ‘idiot with a question’ will beckon for you to follow them to show you the error, re-educate user for the 9th time and as you walk away mumble under your breath something about “taking up a job where you don’t have to deal with idiots with questions”
6. Load up TrackIT8 and peruse new work orders, making a note of which work orders can be marked as low priority and those which can be marked as very-low priority, also note the requester as this may be important in formulating a low priority judgment, rule of thumb is; unless it’s God assigning you a work order, all others can be marked as low priority. Note that there are only ever two priorities in the IT world, low priority and very-low priority. Work orders from your boss fall somewhere in-between low and very-low priority, this is obvious and should not have been mentioned
7. Get interrupted by another random employee with some or other generic problem, answer with generic statement that ventures them to believe that the IT dept actually gives a damn about them
8. Load up Outlook 2007 and browse emails that you never attended to the night before even though you have a Blackberry that the company is paying for
9. Get interrupted by employee drone #436 from sub-junction basement level 4B with some or other problem involving plankton. Pretend to /care.
10. Load up Firefox and prepare to visit various Web 2.0 sites
11. Zone out for an hour, no less.
12. Make plans for lunch, pray that a 5KM long train delays your lunch on return (only valid for commuters affected by trains), consider making another sacrifice with more CD promotional materials
13. Take lunch + extra 10mins. Maybe more … if you prayed for a train hard enough, this will give you a valid excuse for being late from lunch
14. Back at work, zone out for 4 hours, this should be familiar territory by now and you will have no trouble adjusting to this. Always have work related material loaded (but minimized) so as to ‘Alt-Tab’ to it if by chance you are ambushed by those with lesser intelligence to you or by those that would complain to the boss that their petty page alignment problem in Word 2007 hasn’t been attended to. The ambushee needs to be aware that the ambusher doesn’t need to know that said ambushee was updating their blog during this time
15. In the last 30 minutes of the day, pretend to be ultra busy, this will put your acting skills to the test, when walking the halls avoid eye contact with those inclined to ask stupid questions or questions that can be answered with common sense … or at least an IQ of 8.
16. After successfully navigating the hallways return triumphantly to your office/cube
17. Proceed to pack up and go home, if you are hallway hijacked by employee drone # 376 on your way out of the building show him/her a banana or other object made from fruit, this is your secret weapon, your ‘ace’ card so to speak, this will confuse them and they will marvel at the bright fruity colors. This is your chance for exit, take it! Now go watch Big Trouble in Little China.

And so ends the day of the average IT worker. Compiled by Jon who unfortunately has first-hand experience with this. Yea, what a life.