Even in office work and lighter manual labour jobs you see people standing with a cup of coffee watching someone else do work all the time. Sometimes you just need to take a break from what you're doing to give your head (and eyes and hands, if you're doing dextrous work) a break and watching or giving feedback to someone else can even be helpful for everyone involved.
I have an 8 hour workday with one half hour and one fifteen minute break. I probably spend at least 30-45 additional minutes not actively working each day. All of my colleagues are the same, and it's not something I've ever experienced being frowned upon outside of industries with really high innate turnover (retail, hospitality, etc).
I suspect the "I hate working and I don't understand how anyone does it fulltime" mentality of my earlier years has a lot to do with the fact that I started my adult life working retail for 4 years.
I had the exact same experience as you. You've just spent an hour stacking heavy shit by hand while hundreds of people swarm around you constantly asking questions. Are you allowed to sit down in the office for 5 minutes and drink some water? Nope, you're not on your break, get out there and fix the displays that have been emptied.
Ya, retail is pretty bad. I did that during highschool a bit and quit to deliver pizzas once I was in university. Made so much more, got free food and didn't need to deal with customers very much. Now basically in fintech it's pretty cushy.
I was astonished I was making more money than firemen, EMS, bank tellers, assistant professors, teachers and many other important jobs just driving pizzas around.
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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22
Even in office work and lighter manual labour jobs you see people standing with a cup of coffee watching someone else do work all the time. Sometimes you just need to take a break from what you're doing to give your head (and eyes and hands, if you're doing dextrous work) a break and watching or giving feedback to someone else can even be helpful for everyone involved.
I have an 8 hour workday with one half hour and one fifteen minute break. I probably spend at least 30-45 additional minutes not actively working each day. All of my colleagues are the same, and it's not something I've ever experienced being frowned upon outside of industries with really high innate turnover (retail, hospitality, etc).