Your occupation?

[Geminii]

I suppose I should throw in my two cents.

Primarily, I'm a business workflow efficiency consultant specialising in medium to large IT helpdesks and other teams which have similar ticketing/workflow setups (call centres, other IT teams, admin areas etc). I can usually knock off about 50% of the running costs while making the working environment a heck of a lot better for the techs and a lot less stressful for everyone. Turns out a lot of Helpdesk and Service Desk teams get really easily bogged down in old policies and procedures without realising it.

I pretty much just go in and detangle everything, then get the bosses to fix all the things that the techs have identified as problems. It turns out that bosses are a lot more willing to listen to you if you wear a suit, talk in terms of dollars and man-hours, and charge half a million bucks a week - even if you're repeating exactly the same things that the techs have been saying for years. And yes, I can show the financial advantages of things like nice furniture, multiple screens/PCs per tech, advanced diagnostic software, paid industry cert training, high tech salaries etc.

To keep my hand in, I also take on contract roles as an actual IT helpdesker. Hey, it's what I've been doing for over ten years, so I'm not too bad at it. It also gives me the excuse to evaluate a helpdesk from the inside and ferret out the particular local causes of stress and inefficiency, so I can then offer a comprehensive capacity improvement project to the Powers That Be when my time's up.

I write monthly articles for a national Helpdesk industry publication. It's more about getting my name out there than being paid, though.

In my spare time, I invent things, or at least conceptualise them and run them past a local thinktank with links to manufacturers.

[Golden Phoenix]

And yes, I can show the financial advantages of things like nice furniture, multiple screens/PCs per tech, advanced diagnostic software, paid industry cert training, high tech salaries etc.

Can you come into my work and show my boss the financial advantages of letting me sit on my ass all day and do nothing

[Geminii]

Possibly.

I'd bet my fee that I'd be able to make the incoming workload lighter and more consistent, for starters. Probably be able to give you more control over future crises, too.

One point, though - even though I've convinced a number of my own bosses (back before I was doing this freelance) to let me sit around all day doing next to nothing, it gets to be bloody boring after the first couple of weeks. Even surfing the net all day isn't the thrill it might first seem. There's always the nagging feeling that at any minute the boss (or the boss's boss) is going to ask "So what have you been doing all day?", and you won't have an answer.

Plus you get a kind of disconnect with your co-workers - you don't really have the same things to moan about over lunch or at the water cooler. It just doesn't work out well in the long run.

It is nice to have a couple of minutes to yourself here and there between jobs throughout the day, though, and I can fairly easily justify that on a capacity/flexibility basis.