Some people are under the misguided impression that IT jobs are "glamorous" and "exciting". They're not. I was once hired by IBM to answer phones for their internal Y2K Help Desk. Initially, the job kept me pretty busy - my coworker Janette and I were getting a fair number of calls and staying on our toes. After a couple of weeks though the calls really died down. Since Janette and I were contractors, we were treated lower than dirt - we had to give the security guards our driver's licenses every day to get our daily "visitor's badge". We weren't allowed to have a company email account. The company's firewall blocked access to 99.999% of all interesting content on the Internet. We were relegated to sitting in the training room and had to use the PCs there - we were not allowed to customize them at all. Because of all this, if our phones weren't ringing we had nothing to do. And when the calls died down, I started to go a little crazy. To explain it to others, I kept a diary for a day. This entry is from September 1st, 1998 and is absolutely true.  Enjoy my insanity!

7:55am - Entered Building
7:58am - Logged in on the phone.
8:00am - Unzipped a file that had some bitmap flags I was designing with MS Paint (why, yes I am a geek).
8:01am - Played with the flags with MS Paint.
8:12am - Bored with the flags, play a few games of Solitaire.
8:30am - Bored with that, and tired too! I think I'll take a nap.
9:20am - A phone rings, which wakes me up. Need a cigarette.
9:30am - Back, with coffee for me and Janette.
9:35am - ANOTHER quick game of Solitaire.
9:45am - Back to the bitmaps; made an English flag and a couple of others.
10:05am - Started drawing a castle with MS Paint.
10:33am - Yawn. Going for another smoke and a bathroom break.
10:41am - Back. Janitor left the closet unlocked in the bathroom - momentarily considered getting high off Endust.
10:42am - Hmmmm. Bored with the castle - I guess I'll start reading Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.
10:50am - Woo-Hoo! The phone rings!
10:50am - Dammit! Wrong number!
11:35am - Read the first 28 pages of Wise Blood. Janette goes to lunch. Still no calls.
11:45am - Yawn again. Too sleepy for Wise Blood - back to Solitaire.
12:02pm - WOO-HOO! A real call! A guy in Barrington, IL needs IDs created on the t2k4 mainframe!
12:05pm - Through logging the call.
12:06pm - Saw an ad on TV last night for a Carpenter's "Best Of" CD; now I have "On Top Of The World" in my head - the Endust is looking better!
12:15pm - Fuckin' sick of Solitaire. Back to Wise Blood.
12:39pm - Janette is back. Lunchtime!
2:01pm - Omygosh! Another call!
2:18pm - Well, that guy had the wrong number, only it took me 15 minutes to figure it out. For those of you keeping score at home, that's still just 1 call.
2:21pm - A maintenance guy comes in to fuck with a phone on the other side of the room.  Leaves after 30 seconds.
2:25pm - Maintenance guy comes back, picks up the phone, looks puzzled, leaves again.
2:26pm - Mark comes in to say hello - he's a guy that works in the main NOC. I feel like a guy that just got off a deserted island....
2:42pm - Mark leaves. I decide to write rant about a friend of mine that I'll email 'round the world later.
2:50pm - My friend Holly calls.
3:20pm - Holly and I get off the phone.
3:32pm - Holly calls back.
3:40pm - Holly and I get off the phone.
3:43pm - ANOTHER CALL! I'm getting carpal tunnel here! I log on to the mainframe and reset the ID.
3:45pm - Finished rant, not in the mood to do my daily NT studying... hmmmmm. Wonder where the maintenance guy went.
3:46pm - Wonder if the Endust is still in the bathroom. Ah, never mind - back to Flannery O'Connor.
4:53pm - No calls; I'm logging off for the evening.

Yep - eight hours and two phone calls that took a grand total of five minutes to log.  We never used the same PC more than once and eventually I got so bored that I'd change some of the hardware entries in the Registry so that in Device Manager all the hardware was listed as "another crappy IBM product".  I wonder if anyone ever noticed...