Office Etiquette

I work as a college instructor. But since I'm fairly new and the school is growing by leaps and bounds, I am currently housed in a cubicle room. Being fairly antisocial, it's not ideal, but I'm just grateful to have a job.

Usually this office sharing isn't much of a problem: I come in, log onto my three email accounts that students may use to contact me, and turn on Stuff You Should Know podcast on my iPod and commence to reading/responding, etc.

But the other day, I literally had no work to do during my office hour time. It was a welcome relief after having been stressed to the brink of emotional breakdown off and on during the past several months. Anticipating that I would have very little to do during this time, I decided to bring my iPad to my office hour.

I have 3G capability on that bad boy, but haven't ordered a data plan yet, as I have unlimited Internet most places. However, I didn't want to waste the school's nets (and we were kinda asked not to anyway), so I decided to play Puzzle Quest 2, which is an app that doesn't require online communications.

Do you realize how difficult it is to pretend to be doing something productive while actually playing a game? First, I plugged in my earbuds so that no game noises would accidentally occur. Then I sat in my chair, facing my computer (while legitimately checking email), with the iPad in my lap. Periodically, I would sae my game's progress to refresh my email pages, but that's about it.

It's not like I would have gotten into trouble. I mean, I had nothing at all to do. I'm not sure if I was hiding my iPad out of game-playing shame, or because I didn't want to have to talk to anyone about it.

ETA: This was a lot funnier when I first had the idea (while iPadding in my office) than it was in writing. Sorry everyone.