Boredom!
Boredom Joke
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The Patrol Sergeants shared one large office with the Northern Division Lieutenant. We each had our own desk, so there were four desks in the office. There was a squad room where the Deputies were to write their reports then bring them to my office for review. However, the three empty desks in my office were a great temptation. Many of my Officers would sit at these desks and write their reports.
On his desk the Lieutenant had a wooden name plate which also acted as a pen holder. The county supplied pens and he kept one on his desk at all times. About twice a week I would hear about his pen being missing from his desk. He would grab me as soon as I walked into the office at the start of my shift. It was always the same thing, he would say that he didn't mind the Officers using his desk; but, please leave his pens alone.
I got tired of hearing about it so I told my Officers to leave the pens alone. However, his pens still kept coming up missing and I still ended up hearing about it.
One night, an Officer was writing a report at the Lieutenant's desk using his pen, so I told him to make sure it was still there when he finished. The Deputy stopped writing and looked at the pen, then started laughing and said, "Hey Sarge, look at this, he's got his pen marked so he can tell who takes it."
I walked over and looked at the pen, sure enough he had taken a pocket knife and put a notch all the way around the end of the pen. I took that pen and replaced it with another one which had not been marked.
The next afternoon when I came to work he did not say anything about the pen. Later when we checked, we found that the pen on his desk had been marked again. I went to the supply room and got a full box of pens. We marked all of them just like he had done his. We then took his pen and placed the identically marked pens all over the office.
Again the next day he did not say anything about the missing pen. We never again found a marked pen on his desk and either his pen never came up missing again or he just gave up and never bothered saying anything about it.
After the pen incident, the Deputies on my shift would try to think up new ways of messing with the Lieutenant's mind. The Lieutenant had this thing about motorcycle gangs. He had been to several classes put on by the F.B.I., about motorcycle gangs which operated in and around the southeastern states. After attending these classes, every time he would see or hear about four or more motorcycles being together he would be convinced that there was a gang moving into Beaufort County. He drove an unmarked patrol car and he would follow the so-called gang around for hours.
Still looking for a way to push the Lieutenant closer to the brink we decided that if he wanted to keep track of all the motorcycle gangs, we would help him. If we knew he was patrolling in his car and we saw a cycle or two we would call each other on the radio and ask each other if they had seen that group of bikes. It never failed, he would start asking where they were last seen and which way they were headed.
We would get him headed in one direction then give him another sighting in a completely different place. We would do this several times then let the gang just disappear into thin air.
All new Deputies learned quickly to lock their vehicles anytime they got out of them. We did this as a form of training, as well as a form of fun. Anytime we found a car unlocked we would turn everything on full blast so that when the Officer came back and started the car, everything would come on. If the poor soul left his car running and unlocked we would steal it and park it somewhere where he would have to go find it.
We did these things at the office or fast food places but never when a man was on a call. On a call you have enough to worry about just staying alive. After losing his car a couple of times new Officers would get the idea and it would become second nature to lock the car every time he got out of it. All of us carried two or three sets of keys to our cars. However, on several occasions this did present a problem. More then one Officer jumped out of the car locking the door with the key still in the ignition only to realize that, because his car was in the shop and he had borrowed this car, he did not have an extra key.
Another trick we would sometimes pull was at night, on a deserted road, we would wait until another patrol car came by then pull out and catch up without turning on any lights. We would follow the other car for a while then turn on our high beam headlights. After being caught and scared like that a couple of times, you learned to keep your eyes open and watch for anything and everything. Again in a fun way it was good training.
Along the same line, if we heard someone check out of the car to check a building, we would try to sneak up on him with no lights then hit the siren to scare him. All these things kept us on our toes.
One evening while I was working the four to midnight shift, one of my friends played a trick on me. It was about 8 p.m. and my friend called my house. He talked to my wife and told her that he hoped that I was feeling better. My wife asked what he was talking about, and he told her that he was just checking on me since I had called in sick and not come to work.
I would have had a hard time explaining that one when I got home from work except that I had a police radio scanner at home. After my wife received that phone call, she turned on the scanner and heard me out there working.
Boredom
Boredom Psychology
Boredom has been defined by Fisher in terms of its central psychological processes: an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity. Leary and others define boredom similarly, and somewhat more succinctly, as an affective experience associated with cognitive attentional processes. These definitions make it clear that boredom arises not for a lack of things to do but the inability to latch onto any specific activity. Nothing engages us, despite an often profound desire for engagement.There appear to be three general types of boredom, all of which involve problems of engagement of attention. These include times when we are prevented from engaging in something, when we are forced to engage in some unwanted activity or when we are simply unable, for no apparent reason, to maintain engagement in any activity or spectacle.
An important psychological construct is that of boredom proneness; a tendency to experience boredom of all types. This is typically assessed by the Boredom Proneness Scale. link Consistent with the definition provided above, recent research has found that boredom proneness is clearly and consistently associated with failures of attention. Boredom and boredom proneness are both theoretically and empirically linked to depression and depressive symptoms. Nonetheless, boredom proneness has been found to be as strongly correlated with attentional lapses as with depression .
Although boredom is often viewed as a trivial and mild irritant, boredom, and especially boredom proneness has been linked to an amazingly diverse range of psychological, physical, educational, and social problems. oops
Boredom Philosophy
Boredom is a condition characterized by perception of one's environment as dull, tedious, and lacking in stimulation. This can result from leisure and a lack of aesthetic interests. Labor, however, and even art may be alienated and passive, or immersed in tedium (see Marxism). Furthermore, boredom must be distinguished from squalor, in which tedium, though present, is overshadowed by suffering. There is an inherent anxiety in boredom; people will expend considerable effort to prevent or remedy it, yet in many circumstances, it is accepted as suffering to be endured. Common passive ways to escape boredom are to sleep or to think creative thoughts (daydream). Typical active solutions consist in an intentional activity of some sort, often something new, as familiarity and repetition lead to the tedious.Boredom also plays a role in existentialist thought. Heidegger wrote about boredom in two texts available in English, in the 1929/30 semester lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and again in the essay What is Metaphysics? published in the same year. In the lecture, Heidegger included about 100 pages on boredom, probably the most extensive philosophical treatment ever of the subject. He focused on waiting at train stations in particular as a major context of boredom. In Kierkegaard's remark in Either/Or, that "patience cannot be depicted" visually, there is a sense that any immediate moment of life may be fundamentally tedious.
Without stimulus or focus, the individual is confronted with nothingness, the meaninglessness of existence, and experiences existential anxiety. Heidegger states this idea nicely: "Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole."
Arthur Schopenhauer used the existence of boredom in an attempt to prove the vanity of human existence, stating, "...for if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfill and satisfy us."
Erich Fromm and other similar thinkers of critical theory speak of bourgeois society in terms similar to boredom, and Fromm mentions sex and the automobile as fundamental outlets of postmodern boredom.
Boredom Paradigm Cases
Above and beyond taste and character, the universal case of boredom consists in any instance of waiting, as Heidegger noted, such as in line, for someone else to arrive or finish a task, or while one is travelling. Waiting for one's opponent to move in a chess game or similar game can be boring, but this is more often the case for spectators, hence the cliche regarding chess that for many amateurs it is like "watching paint dry."Boredom in travel, for example, often lends itself to a portable game or a repetitive song such as 99 Bottles of Beer. It is not clear why repetitive singing would be a response to tedium, but it may be a form of mockery. Similarly a number of repetitive gestures or games may be considered imitations of the tediousness of waiting, or of the moving hands of a clock.
Driving superfluously, especially very fast, is associated with an overcoming of boredom in travel, by treating the vehicle in a particularly gratuitous, reckless and rebellious manner. Attempting this, moreover, can clearly be dangerous and illegal. Boredom, however, may also increase as travel becomes more convenient, as the vehicle may become more like the windowless monad in Leibniz's monadology. The automobile requires fast reflexes, making its operator busy and hence, perhaps for other reasons as well, making the ride more tedious despite being over sooner.
If a tedious feeling is not the result of waiting, however, it is simply the fact of existence, and many more or less intellectual activities might be explored in order to give it shape, depending on one's intellectual or spiritual refinement and one's opportunity and appetite for friendship and sex. Certain character traits influence both susceptibility and response to boredom. Boredom can therefore be subjective, and a matter of taste, and can result in either increased isolation or social interaction.
In contexts where one is confined spatially or not, boredom may be met with various religious activities, not because religion would want to associate itself with tedium, but rather, partly because boredom may be taken as the essential human condition, to which God, wisdom, or morality are the ultimate answers. Boredom is in fact taken in this sense by virtually all existentialist philosophers as well as by Schopenhauer. Other responses to boredom, to the extent that one is free, include games, reading, socializing, physical exercise, art, an enormous array of hobbies, sciences and philosophy, or the search for further diversity. Finally, boredom is also linked to substance use, to both a mild and abusive degree.
The first record of the word boredom is in the novel, Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, although the expression to be a bore had been used in the sense of "to be tiresome or dull" since 1768. In a previously unpublished poem "Ennui" from her undergraduate years, the poet Sylvia Plath explores the literary theme of world-weariness.
Time often seems to move more slowly to someone who experiences boredom. This results from the way in which the human mind measures the passage of time, combined with the infrequency of events perceived as notable. Children who continually suffer from boredom may become severely depressed and might not be able to focus on the real world and life in general.
Boredom Causes
Boredom can be a symptom of clinical depression. Some boredom is a form of learned helplessness, a phenomenon closely related to depression. Some philosophies of parenting propose that if children are raised in an environment devoid of stimuli, and are not allowed or encouraged to interact with their environment, they will fail to develop the mental capacities to do so. These children are then bored even when placed in an environment others would find stimulating.Most would agree that the fundamental cause of boredom is leisure, which of course implies that boredom is most problematic in a life which combines wealth with a lack of artistic talent and aesthetic values.
Boredom is often associated with adolescence, especially in suburbs, small towns, and other isolated areas. A typical teenager's complaint is that there is "nothing to do." This statement can have a number of economic and social causes. Others disagree, arguing that few environments are inherently boring, and that boredom reflects a lack of imagination, initiative and creativity.
Boredom Practical effects
The Unsmiling Tsarevna (Nesmeyana), by Viktor VasnetsovFar from being a minor annoyance, boredom can have major negative impacts on people. Perhaps more importantly, boredom is often a symptom of deeper problems, such as depression, ineffective classroom teaching, or ineffective management in the workplace. This can also be due to the fact that some people just communicate poorly.Boredom in the workplace does more than just waste time. Studies in behavioral finance have shown that stock traders can enter into "overtrading" (buying or selling even without any objective reason to do so) because they feel bored when they have nothing "productive" to do. Boredom in the workplace also hurts people's sense of self-worth, which can cause them to work less effectively or even to not work at all.
On the other hand boredom may be beneficial in some ways. Boredom is a natural feeling that comes about when the person feels as though there is nothing new or nothing to inspire their thought in that situation. To relieve boredom then that person may take up a new hobby or come up with an interesting idea by thinking creatively.
