As an employee of a major corporation's
IS division, overhead is one
of my favorite words.
When I'm doing "overhead," quite simply, it means that I'm not writing
code--and I'm still getting paid. My first week or two on the job,
all the paperwork I have to fill out and introductory meetings and seminars
get logged under overhead. All the compliance training HR makes
me do is also overhead.
But wait, there's more! When I have to call one of our tech support
lines to fix one of my Unix accounts or get something else fixed, that's
overhead. When the CD-ROM drive on my work computer blows up, the
entire afternoon I spend trying to fix it and find a new one is overhead.
When I have to go down the hall to use another office's copy machine because
we don't have one, that's overhead.
I LOVE overhead.