Does Anyone Else Do This? No. 3 in an Occasional Series

Find displacement activities more boring than working but still do them anyway

It isn’t until you’re bored at work that you realise just how dreary the Internet is. At least, that is, if you’re a PC slave like me. It’s amazing – a whole world of people, endless novelty, so much…er…stuff and yet it all quickly becomes tiresome. After all, there’s only so many times you can check your Hotmail, browse the BBC news site for stories about sharks giving birth to robots or check the latest price of the things you’re selling on eBay. The elasticity of time perception is stretched to its limit, dragging like an iron ball on a prisoner’s fetters, as you read yet another review of the Nintendo Wii.

And, interestingly, when you’re flat-out working, time passes really quickly. Your brain becomes stimulated by solving problems, getting a proper work-out. I write and find that hours have flashed by.

Yet, despite knowing this, there’s always the period before I get down to business, where I’ll put it off for as long as possible, desperate to find a worthwhile distraction. There never is one – but this won’t stop me looking…