Got to work and was logged in promptly at 8...and proceeded to do nothing at all for two hours. At least, nothing work-related.
There were virtually no calls yesterday. The woman who sits in the next row over, who takes retail and consumer calls, she was mostly quiet during that time, too.
Read the old novel I've been mulling the rewrite for, and then--in a fit of desperation--I dug out my portable hard drive and started watching anime: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I intended only to watch one ep, but as the day wore on with zero work I just kept going. I would have done that all day had I not run into an intractable problem: the second season was encoded in MKV format, and apparently Windows 7 Professional doesn't include codecs for that. I was able to find a codec pack on-line that didn't require admin access to install, but it didn't render the soft subtitles correctly and I couldn't make it work.
So if you watch the two TV series in chronological order, once you get past the "Melancholy of..." story arc there's a one-ep story ("Boredom of...") and then comes "Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody". BLR is, however, the first ep of the second season, which is--as I said--MKV format.
Even so, that comes to seven eps.
I do not particularly like this, but because of how things are set up I must keep my eyes on the screen at all times. Phone calls sound a tone, but emails are silent--and if you don't answer an email in 15 seconds, the system pops you out of ready mode. So anything I do where my eyes are off the screen is interrupted with me having to look at the screen every ten seconds just to make sure I'm not missing anything.
And when you're just sitting at a desk waiting you must do something. When this kind of thing happens there is literally nothing for me to do.
Plus side: these are reasonable people. As long as it doesn't interfere with work, and as long as you use common sense, there isn't a problem. As soon as work comes in I stop whatever I'm doing and work on it. I make sure to avoid anything with nudity or profanity.
...but holy crap does it bother me. I'm not sitting at my desk exulting in the fact that I'm watching anime at work; my feeling is, "I should be working, not doing this!" But there is no work, and so I sit. If I don't watch videos, or read, I am sitting and doing nothing, and my eyes leave the screen, and I miss incoming emails.
Emails were all I did for the first six hours yesterday. I think I had one call before lunch, which was at 2, and that wasn't even from a user but from the Offshore engineering team. The rest were emails.
Oh--and by the way, I handled a total of six interactions in those six hours. Six.
It takes perhaps three or four minutes to deal with an email requesting that a ticket be created. The ones that cropped up yesterday are so routine, though, and so simple that I can generate their tickets in two minutes or less.
The guy I work with on Saturdays, he says that things vary. There are times when it's extremely busy, even on Saturdays. And it's true that this week is the big spring convention down in Dallas, so a lot of the retailers and vendors were busy with that and not calling us. That's probably a big factor, right there. There is not much warehouse activity on Saturdays, and of course most vendors don't call outside of business hours. And come late April moving into May, that's the busy season, and things will speed up considerably.
We'll see, I suppose. I do know that things are slower now than they were in January; I remember coming to work on a Saturday and spending the first hour dealing with emails. It's slower now, but there's no reason to assume it will always be thus. And I certainly am busy enough during the week!
* * *
Watched a couple more eps of Gundam W last night.
I hadn't realized it came so soon, but ep 8 features the duel between Treize Kushrenada (the main bad guy) and Wu Fei (one of the teenage Gundam pilots). This bit I do remember from the last viewing more than a decade ago; having lost the duel, Wu Fei goes off to sulk somewhere for I forget how long.
It kind of makes sense that the Gundam pilots are annoying fuckers. They're maybe 14 or 15, and they've spent their entire lives being trained to kill and destroy and not to have any fear, so they are going to be screwed up, one way or another. But even keeping that in mind, in the larger context of the story at hand I just find them irritating.
It really is a big story, with a huge cast list and a lot of stuff going on. It's sometimes hard to keep track of who is who; and when someone shows up whom we haven't seen for a while it may take a bit to remember where we saw him last. But it's a tale well told.
* * *
Because I didn't want to watch Haruhi out of order, I found myself watching a couple eps of Rocket Girls, which I haven't seen since my initial viewing of it--and so I recall very little of it. It's pretty good.