Something is keeping me from reaching my full potential. I have thought about it, and the answer is simple. It's the internet.
I peruse the internet in all its perverted glory whenever I have a break in the action while at my desk. After a phone call, when I get into the office, when I get back from an outing, between reading transcripts or cases or documents of any sort.... I check my email. I check out every statistic for every sport or athlete I ever liked or like, I find pictures of the hot Victoria Secret girl, who is my favorite VS Girl to post on this blog to make it look better (or interesting, as Unruly points out, you have to have an attention grabber to get people interested in what you have to say):
I look at three blogs (this one, Just NY Jets and the Mets one) and get sick every time I see "Ed From Winchester" or any "real" person's blog and how they ignore or dismiss any new commentors that arise on their sites. I loathe the fact that these people think they are real writers or people actually care what they have to say. I know my audience, it is 3 people, and most of them don't care what I have to say. Last time I checked, nobody with a Mets blog won a Pulitzer.
I check cnn.com and watch videos of random news clips but now my speakers are broken so I can't watch anything except for without the sound. Strangely, I still watch movie trailers in their muted form, and sometimes I even watch those random news clips, happy that I can't hear the 32 second commercial that precedes them, but wishing I could hear what the witness to the elephant stomping saw.
I'm pissed that my speakers don't work anymore but I am afraid to complain because it could bring some heat on me as to why I even need my speakers. So instead, I am stuck to listening to the sound of silence.
Sometimes I don't think that it's just the internet keeping me from reaching my potential. Every day I try to take a lunch and I bring it back to my desk and eat it, slowly, while reading the newspaper. Of course I can't close my office door so as not to be antisocial or to arouse suspicion as to what I am doing in my office. I focus my attention on the sports, "Today" and local county sections of the paper, looking for my old buddies' names there, what show I want to watch later on TV, and of course the precious Mets/Jets news I enjoy reading.
My bosses sometimes walk by my office and give me a sideways glance, "why isn't he working?" "what the hell is taking an hour lunch for?" "is he still reading that fucking paper?" they must think. I try to ignore them, but I hear and take notice of every step by and glance in. They are too nice or too exasperated to say anything, I think, but maybe they don't care.
Every weekend I am required and/or subtly pressured to come into the office and show my face and/or actually do work. I have been quite neglectful about this obligation. First I had a trip to MA, then one to VA, as I purposely gave my superiors a heads up that I was "out of state" for the weekend, thereby not able to fulfill the "face-time" requirement that is sort of mandatory at the office. Then I had a baseball game on Sunday and I had to mow the lawn and do other yard work on Saturday. Another dilemma, solved by not going into the office. This weekend was Mother's Day, and I could not find the time to make it into the office again. Every week that goes by it gets easier and easier to find excuses not to go into the office on the weekend. I'm working from home, they won't even know I'm not there, I have to do anything else but go in, I want to spend time with my family, whatever.... but I know they know. They are waiting to ambush me and ask me about my weekend attendance. They will expose me for the "face-time" fraud that I am. This concerns me almost enough to go into work on a weekend. The thought of going in on a Sunday afternoon or morning intrigues me, because most times nobody is in the office at that time. But that begets the question, "If a person goes into work and nobody sees him, was he really there?" A well-placed office email or a note left on desk sometimes is enough evidence to show I was there, but now that we can access our email accounts from home that avenue is all but gone, and all that is left is the lame note, asking a question I don't need an answer for or relaying some useless information that nobody needs.
The truth is, I do do work at home, occasionally, on a Sunday evening, after everyone is in bed and the Sopranos are over, I settle down and get some work done. I don't see the need to show my face and do work I can otherwise do in the comfy confines of my living room. But I digress...
Despite my proclivity to get distracted by random nonsense, I manage to diligently get done everything that needs to be done. I am on top of every file that has been assigned to me, and I have been getting good results on my cases. Yet sometimes I think of all of the time I have wasted and I wonder, what if there was no internet? What if I didn't care what Mike Piazza's stats on the A's were? (.282, 1HR, 8 RBI), What if I didn't give a shit about seeing video of a coyote in a downtown Chicago Quiznos? What if I focused on work for 10 hours straight? What if I didn't speak on the phone with my family or friends? The answer again is simple - I would be king of the world.
Come to think of it, I don't think it's the internet, I think it's me. I think that I am not fulfilling my potential. I am going to stop right and now and start wor....
