The Office is one of my favorite TV shows, and the Office Olympics episode is a classic. If you aren’t familiar with it, go watch it, but in the meantime, the basic idea is that they all have these little games and ways to pass the time that they do during the day.
I know that I had several of those at my most recent desk job, and I know that many of you do too. So I want to pick your collective brain about some of your favorite, most interesting ways to pass the time. Don’t be shy–the more juvenile, the better!
We’ll take some of the best ones and do features on them at a later date. You can remain anonymous if you prefer. That might be a good idea actually. A pseudonym or something.
Let the games begin!
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12 responses so far ↓
1 Free Quent Peer // Jul 10, 2007 at 2:39 pm
When I got really bored, I would go to the water fountain and drink as much water as I could. Then I would time how long it would be before I went to the bathroom. I created a spreadsheet and did some pretty intense analysis on urination patterns. One day I accidentally sent this to my boss instead of my sales forecast. I got a bonus for volume flushed.
2 Chris // Jul 10, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Like the previous post, I also drink as much water as possible during the day. One, it takes at least a minute and a half to go fill up the cup with ice and water…and then at least 18 seconds to pee once every hour. I’ve calculated that the trips to the water cooler and bathroom shorten my day by 14 minutes.
To shorten my day, I also take extended lunch breaks. The key is: 1) To either go to lunch before everyone else, so that they’ll be at lunch when you get back and have no idea how long you’ve been gone. or 2) Go after everyone has left so that they have no idea when you left. I average about a 95 min lunch break daily.
3 Gilldaman // Jul 10, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Let’s see how do I pass the time? The Nerf basketball net on the back of my office sure does help! We would get 4 guys playing best shooting 10 shots and whoever had the best won. There were also bonus point shots, ie off the wall, non-dominate hand, and even a combination of the the two. The ultimate shot was bouncing the ball off the ground and kicking it in. To date no one has hit that shot. Fun times.
4 Jen // Jul 10, 2007 at 11:17 pm
So, i tried to spend my time “improving myself”…I went with scouring gossip sites to learn the latest celebrity dirt, and conspiring with a fellow co-worker to photoshop pics of our coworkers to get them to look “better”. Other favorites included googling co-workers to determine personal information, spying on cube-mates, randomly myspacing/facebooking coworkers, and of course, taking interviews for future jobs in the conference room…
Oh, a small obsession was “you-tubing” , so I invented a “Video Friday” e-mail to send out the best junk videos I found to all my friends who were trying to waste time at the office as well. The best part of this is that it then inspired friends to waste their time trying to find videos to send to me…
I definately mastered the appearance of working…
5 Randy // Jul 11, 2007 at 10:16 am
Among the many time passing diversions my co-workers and I have created, 3 really stand out. 1st we invented a game called WaterBottle in which we would all stand around in a circle and toss a water bottle the rule was you could never stop the water bottle only change its direction, points for style were awarded based on creativity and level of difficulty. There were also two badmitten racquets ( no idea where they came from) that we would use to peg people with paper balls. and the favorite office activity was sneaking “Daves Insanity hot sauce” onto unsuspecting coworkers lunches and then waiting to see their reactions… good times
6 Melissa // Jul 11, 2007 at 10:29 am
When I answered phones at a car dealership in college, I used to bring in one life-saver candy for every half hour I worked to give me something to look forward to (sad, I know). At this same job, two of my bosses would often pass their hours by prank-calling me and pretending to be difficult customers.
7 Darin // Jul 11, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Well, Me and this guy used to throw the ball around the office all day at each other. Also, he would always update me on the latest games and youtubes on the internet. I believe one of the most addicting ones was www.teagames.com (”ding” plug chime) I was pretty addicted to a motocross game and probably wasted $10-$15K of that years salary on that game.
8 Muffin Baseball Champion // Jul 12, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I remember one day in particular that was great fun. Someone had brought in breakfast - muffins, fruit, etc. It must have been around Christmas, because the office was basically empty, and my boss was walking to throw away a wrapping paper tube in the trash. My co-worker said something ridiculous or funny - and we were all in fiesty moods that morning, so I jokingly tossed a mini-muffin at her. Out of reflex, she tossed it towards our boss, and he promptly batted it back towards us - the whole thing flew apart all over me and a co-worker. It’s the closest thing to an office food fight I have been a part of. A classic memory.
9 heath // Jul 12, 2007 at 6:32 pm
We had four people in an office with really high walls. Three of enjoyed a spirited game that involved a promotional beach ball from Radio Shack. The game was a combination of racquetball and dodge ball. The fourth ignored us and conducted conversations as if nothing was going on. Although he was officially declared out-of-bounds, the occasional stray ball would sometimes pound him in the temple. Amazingly, he didn’t drop a syllable or even acknowledge he had been tattooed. Obviously, with that type of passive-agression, he was secretly recategorized from out-of-bounds to double bonus.
10 Jonas // Jul 13, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I work at a nationwide coffee store chain and every night we have to clean the floors behind the counters as part of our closing procedure. Whenever myself and this certain other barista work together, we keep the floor wet and attempt to slide the 25 ft. section of floor from the door to the back room across behind the counters to another wall- without falling, using hands, or anything other form of cheating. I am currently the world record holder with no other successful attempts thus far actually making it to the wall.
11 Eric B // Aug 10, 2007 at 1:19 pm
There are several things I do to pass time when I am bored at work or completed my work for the day. First, I like to go for a walk, as long as it is not to hot outside!
Second, I head over to the bookstore to read, well,.. books or magazines
12 Joey P. // Dec 12, 2007 at 8:05 pm
At my job i have the privilege of working with my best friend. We work as CAD operators at a small engineering firm. The office made a horrible mistake of assigning me the job of maintaining the office’s digital cameras. So we would pass time by sneaking around the office taking photos of ourselves behind unsuspecting coworkers. Every now and then we would up the anty and remove random particles of clothing, just to see how far we could go. I actually have about a dozen or more photos standing behind several coworkers at their desk wearing nothing but my underwear. We call it the Mandingo files. No apparent reason i guess its just symptoms of going stir crazy.
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