Ways to Waste Time at Work

• Browse maps of locations you might someday visit.
• Save up all the email you meant to send all week and do it all at once.
• "Review" your old work.
• Get change for the candy machine.
• Reorganize your files.
• Call your home and leave messages for the dog on the answering machine.
• Make dinner plans with the Professor. Be exceedingly vague so that you'll have to have a long, drawn-out email exchange for what could be settled in 35 seconds on the phone.
• Get folks riled up about their in-laws.
• Go and get the mail.
• Write your to-do list.
• Review your to-do list.
• Consider writing a brief poem centering the names of people who have birthdays in October and one bland, unimportant character trait they share in common.
• Call it "The Butcher, Miss J., and the Divine Ms. B all have noses."
• Realize, after titling the poem, you've basically given away the whole point of the poem.
• Wonder if you've forgotten that the Man in Miss J's House also has an October birthday.
• How will you fit him into your poem?
• Practice making "I'm very concerned about what's on my computer screen" faces.
• Consider an experiment in which you make your dad and The Butcher watch the first fifteen minutes of every new movie, then insist they guess the end. If they're right, will that make them psychic or just prove that there are no new ideas?
• Try testing your own psychic powers by trying to make the Shill and the Super Genius both crave pickles.
• Wonder if that's really a fair test of psychic powers. Instead, use psychic powers to ask the Professor's brother to pick a number between 1 and 10.
• Intuit that he's picked 7.
• Psychically ask him if his number was 7.
• Receive telepathic confirmation! You're psychic.
• Briefly consider accepting phone calls for psychic readings at your desk.
• Make a list of "Ways to Waste Time at Work."