Working from the bench
I am at work right now, but there is no work for me to do. No clients are paying me to do anything right now.
I know of one or two one day projects between now and the end of the year, but the rest of the time I will probably be on the bench. Fortunately, I am a salaried consultant, so I am getting paid anyway.
I do have a few responsibilities while on the bench.
- Be constantly accessible in case a client wants me to work on something immediately.
- Help other coworkers if they get stuck on projects. We frequently will bounce ideas off of each other and it only makes sense to ask the people on the bench first.
- Stay out of trouble.
It is 100% expected that I will spend the rest of the day surfing the internet.
It is really weird getting used to being at work with nothing to do and when it stretches out for several weeks, you can start to get paranoid. I had about 6 weeks during the summer where I was only billable (working for a client) about 1 day a week.
Fortunately, I had been billable almost constantly for the year prior and most of the time since.
My favorite perk to being on the bench is that I can almost always come in early and leave for home between 2:30-3:00pm. This time of year it is really nice to actually see the sun once in a while.
Tags: career, consulting, kids
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POSTED IN: Managing Work
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