I’ve got some downtime at work and I’d rather not write my blog post after 10:00 tonight like I usually do. Writing at work has always scared me, though.

Let me explain.

I once had a job where I did very little for almost a year. I took the job when it was a small start up company. It turns out that the founders were just building a codebase to sell to a larger company.

It worked. We were sold and the CEO, CTO, and CFO all took jobs elsewhere. Then, less than a year later, we were bought again by an even larger company.

My job changed dramatically in the course of two years. We were using new frameworks that I didn’t know and that no one trained me in. In the transition, I had been lost in the shuffle.

The problem, though, was that, with each purchase, my base salary went up as well as the size of the company. In its final incarnation, my company consisted of approximately 70,000 people. So, I had no incentive to leave and with the increased bureaucracy of a much larger company, I was much harder to fire.

I both complained about this incessantly to my friends and took full advantage of the light workload. I came in late, took an hour and a half lunch – I would journal in Bryan Park, maybe peruse a bookstore – and left early. I often found myself with nothing to do which many people envied.

Don’t.

It’s hard to look busy when you don’t have anything to do and you can’t just blatantly do other stuff. I would just kind of sit there trying to look like I had work while I had none. It sounds simple until you have to do it multiple hours per day.

People would ask me, “Why don’t you get some writing done?” Because people know what a Word document looks like and it may have been a step too far in the George Constanza-esque brinksmanship of me versus the corporation.

And yet, here I am, writing during work hours. I feel okay about it, though. I have work, I’m just waiting on some assets right now. Also, this hasn’t taken me too long.

But I’m not going to push it.

P.S. Just for the hell of it… Everyone is talking about Childish Gambino’s “This is America” video. Check out any of the articles coming out explaining all of the references, like this one from HuffPo for example. But on SNL this past weekend, he mentioned “Redbone” which I’d never heard. Since you’re probably being inundated with “This is America,” I’m including “Redbone” here because I listened to it for the first time today (sorry if I’m way late to the party on this, that’s just how I am these days).

P.P.S. I had heard that Donald Glover got his rap moniker by taking the “What’s Your Wu Tang Name?” quiz that was online years back. Mine was Pre-Raphaelite Shaolin.