the great slowdown
2006-08-06 | 7:35 p.m.

I can tell that the summer is starting to wind down, because the summer rush of work in the lab is starting to wind down. I've finished the transcriptions I had been doing (dozens of children telling the story of what happened when a rottweiler was left to babysit). I'm almost finished editing the audio files for the English-language computer game we're putting together. I've collected and edited the adult voice samples for the French-language game, and although there will be many more child samples to do eventually, they haven't been recorded yet. I still haven't figured out what the problem is with our experiment-design software - contacting the company that made it proved useless, but through a convoluted chain of contacts, I was able to get a hold of one of the people who wrote the software. So, he's working on it. Probably.

It isn't until now that I've realized just what it was that's made this job so great. Aside from the fact that I adore the people I work with, the great thing about it is this: no matter how tedious the work may have been, there was always work to be done. I never found myself sitting around, feeling guilty about the fact that I was being paid to surf the net.

Until now. I have so little left to do. And it isn't like my last job, where I was all by myself in the office and no one could see me goofing off when things slowed down. Nor is it like my bank job, where I was in a cubicle, and, if I positioned my chair just right, I could take a nap at my desk and no one would notice. (Seriously. I think Dilbert once did a series of strips on the life of a summer intern that was eerily accurate.)

So, I'm dawdling. I'm drawing out the work. I'm wasting time. I'm being as inefficient as I know how to be. And I hate it. I can't even entertain myself while I have nothing to do, because everyone else is working in the same bitty little room!

Faugh.

Although, I did discover the other day that I'm not the only person in the lab who reads Respectful Insolence. Which is kind of cool. Given that there are only a handful of other people who ever use the lab computers ... I wonder who it is?

Hey. Given how intellectually understimulated I am at work right now, I'll take my mysteries where I can find them.

On another note, I might have an actual date next weekend. Me. On a date. With someone I'm not inadvertently already in a captial-R Relationship with.

Stop the presses!

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