What am I Doing
What do you assume about other employees when you don’t know what they are doing? I was surprised to discover that the answer was: nothing. When I was a technician, working for a professor, I heard about a meeting of graduate students. The topic of their meeting was me. They decided, based on their ignorance of what I was doing there, that I was doing nothing. They also complained that I should have been helping them with their research, and even that I kept my office door open.
My boss, the professor, had also heard about the meeting. He knew that I was not doing nothing. I was only doing nothing that helped them in their research. What they meant was that I was doing nothing from their point of view. I was working on something completely different; I was conducting research in a different area.
My boss told me that I was not expected to help them because I was not hired to do that. That statement seemed quite reasonable to me. Nobody could explain what harm I did by keeping my office door open. To me, it only meant that I’d welcome the opportunity to talk to anybody who came by.