> I just spent nearly two hours sitting around the
> office with nothing to do besides call people,
> chitchat with my coworkers, and read the novel
> I'm currently reading, because something
> went haywire with our network.

I had something similar happen when I worked as an intern (in internet communications) at a large corporation... except it lasted much, MUCH longer.

Our project was redesigning and overhauling a very large company website. All our work was related to the servers in some way - we got the old documents off the server, ported them to the new version in a database system ALSO on the server, and checked and did QA on the completed pages (on the server).

IT informed us that they were going to put the website on a shiny new server, and that it would take three hours. Okay.

It took three days. Three days in which we could do no work at all. Well, there was SOME work to do, small things like filing papers and such, but that was done before lunchtime on day one. As I recall, my co-workers and I spent a lot of time poking around online (I remember looking up vacations to Cancun with my manager), wandering around the halls asking if the server was up yet, and making jelly-bean-raids on one of our co-workers.

At least we still got paid, but yeesh, it was very very boring.

Sosi"that job ruled, though"qui