Day 29 How to Entertain Yourself at Work

So as you probably know, my work here in China consists of mainly doing research for a Chinese asset management company. We have two main projects: Compiling a database of mutual and hedge fund products that invest in the greater China region and creating a presentation on the global expansion strategies of other asset management companies. There’s no doubt that I’ve learned a lot about finance and international markets in the process, but sometimes sitting at a computer for nine hours a day gets a little tedious. And when five out of those nine hours are spent reading Chinese websites translated very poorly by Google Translator, you really see how much you can handle. Luckily, we’re a creative bunch and have come up with some good ways to entertain ourselves. This picture captures several of those ways (note: these will not be nearly as funny to you as they are to me):

1. We are frequently privileged to see great displays of talent, such as Evan’s skill of balancing things on his knee. Juice bottle, phone, pen. Incredible. James will have to show him up tomorrow.
2. Note the white board above Evan’s head and the portion of the diagram drawn on it. So after visiting hundreds, maybe thousands, of company websites, you start to see a lot of ridiculous looking diagrams and flowcharts. They make absolutely no sense when you look at them closely, but they’re the sort of things that businesses just love to put on their websites. So we drew our own Boston room flow chart. The part you can’t see demonstrates how growth and innovation lead to solutions and is very inspirational to us.
3. So it might look like Evan is busy reading about mutual fund returns, but in reality there was an Old Snakey showdown going on as this picture was being taken. This daily event occurs from about 2:30 to 2:40 every day and consists of James challenging Evan to beat his top score, me placing bets on who’s going to win that day while trying to remain neutral, and watching Evan run into a wall while bragging about his awesome score. I don’t usually enjoy watching computer games being played, but this is hilarious.
So as you can see, even the most tedious work can be broken up with small adventures.