Frivolous Friday, 07.10.2009: If timesheets were honest

One pitfall of working in a firm whose business model basically amounts to "renting out brains" is the weekly ritual of the timesheet. Now, I don't care how productive you actually are, the account of your doings can only fall into the category of fiction known as "based on a true story." How truly autobiographical it is, is of course, left to the individual author. But I suspect that, if we were allowed to speak truth to HR, entries might look something like:

• Humored the office's "hermit-crab" programmer with a lengthy discussion of the continuity errors between the first three "Star Wars" movies and the prequels.
  
• Goofed off on Facebook/Twitter/Myspace/etc. waiting for The Powers That Be to finish their meeting so that I could start the meeting that I was supposed to have with my boss. Twenty minutes ago.
• Filed documents--documents that really should stay at my fingertips just now--to look busy for the last half hour of the week when nothing I start will be remotely recognizable on Monday.
• Goofed off on Slashdot/TechCrunch/CNet/Ars Technica/Tech Tribe/etc. waiting for the control freak project lead to return from lunch and bless the code before it's committed (not merged!).
  
• Trolled the network share, my hard drive, and even spelunked Deleted Items for the code I was told to "forget" months ago because the office prima-donna was "already working on something like that." Until s/he quit, anyway.
• Goofed off via IM while pretending to be taking notes during a meeting which is a the same meeting we always have when no one wants to tell the product manager that boiling the ocean is not a viable business model.
• Rewrote a proposal (again!) to demonstrate to the client that no matter how we rearrange the line items, their total cost stays the same.
• Goofed off by playing "The six degrees of Kevin Bacon" in my head while stuck in mandatory training sessions that honest-to-Pete do not apply to anything I do or will ever do.
  
• Squandered no trifling amount of energy and morale squashing the Sales Dept's pretensions to software design b/c there's neither budget nor room in the schedule.