I finally got a job, and now I understand Dilbert cartoons.

I have a job at a web development company that’s about an hour away in rush hour traffic (or fifteen minutes at non-peak times). Their big thing is not designing pretty sites, but rather creating useful, business-oriented, database-driven applications, such as catalogs. They mostly concentrate on the information, and not so much on the appearance.

Hell, they concentrate not at all on appearance.

Their motto should be “We build boring web sites.” Maybe I’ll suggest that sometime. Maybe not.

They hired me because they are “expanding rapidly.” I originally assumed that this meant they had many orders coming in and a great deal of work to be done, but I have learned that neither of these is true.

Basically I have less than an hour of work to do each day.

The rest of the time, though, I have to “look busy.” The purpose of this is not so that I can steer clear of real work. There really is very little real work, and when it comes, they give it to me whether I look busy or not.

So why do I have to look busy? I have no idea. They didn’t tell me why I should look busy, but they told me I should look busy. I’m assuming it has to do with company morale or something.

I don’t really mind having to look busy without having anything to accomplish, though. After all, here at work I have a T-1 connection to the internet.

For those of you who are not familiar with T-1, let me explain it briefly: Your modem at home is a paraplegic turtle. My T-1 is light. In other words, it’s really fast.

So I can now spend my days doing basically the same thing I did before I got a job, but with better equipment, and I’m getting paid for it.

I like my job.