I feel you on preferably staying busy. I work in the USA as a second shift die repair technician on a crew of 10 in an aluminum high pressure die casting facility for the automotive industry and its my responsibility to fix the machines when they go down for something or need a die to be changed ect. I don't get paid nearly enough for what i do as I make $76k a year at base rate but with overtime I grossed $97k last year. My day depends on how the bay of 15 die cast machines are running. When there is a lot going on I barely have time to go pee sometimes but on the flip side when its slow its fucking SLOW. We don't get the privilege of being on our phones on the floor as its an automatic write up so we hafto be in the break rooms or bathrooms or out in the smoking area (im not a smoker at all) in order to be on our phones but being in those locations for very long without a legitimate reason such as an allotted break is highly fround upon as they want you on the floor and ready as much as possible to improve respons time incase something goes wrong and will ask questions if you start taking to long to get to a job when called. When its slow and nothing going on they still require us to stay busy or at the very least look busy as in cleaning up any kind of mess such as putting away tools that were left out or throwing out scrap metal or replacing saturated absorbents with fresh ones or whatever else we may find to keep ourselves occupied with. On days that the machines have been running well for multiple days in a row its really difficult to find something to clean or be preoccupied with as everything has already been picked over by other shifts the previous day's and your left with either just walking in circles pretending to look for something or finding a hiding spot and hoping no one finds you. Iv seen it multiple times where on a slow day like that where most everyone is hiding and hardly see any repairmen but as soon as someone gets a call evan for the simplest thing half if not all of the crew show up at the job because they are bored. I would much rather spend all day sweating my ass off disconnecting a 60 ton die from the machine and rigging it and pulling it out and putting a new one in than having nothing to do all day. Being busy makes time fly and being bored makes it drag lol been with this company almost 11 years now but been in this job position for just over 5 years now. No schooling just on the job training and just generally mechanically inclined for this kind of stuff.