May I introduce? That’s break time penguin Pit!

Pit sees you working hard every day and doing your best. However, Pit also sees how you don’t give your body any rest and get more and more tense during the day. Pit wants to help you!

How many times have you caught yourself looking at your screen with an icy gaze? Your neck hurts, your eyes don’t work so well anymore and of course you know that it’s time for a break. But how often do you only realize at the end of a long working day that a short break or two might have done some good after all?

This is a thing of the past at fme AG – thanks to a penguin!

The Hour of Birth

The idea for Pit came up in our personnel department. Under the slogan health@fme there are already great initiatives like the green office, the mobile massage service or the Sweet-free-Wednesday. Now a penguin joins this line, my fellow Pit.

The DNA

Behind Pit stands an app I programmed. Break time penguin Pit is a program that runs in the background and checks if you take enough breaks while working at the computer.

The Personality

In individually adjustable time intervals, you will receive small banners (in one of the screen corners) with health tips or a full-screen message reminding you to take a short break.

Translation: Take a break. Take care of a healthy and varied posture.

Translation: Your eyes look exhausted, take a break.
Let me work, this is important.

Via settings, further changes can be made and some features can also be deactivated.

Translation: Open settings. Exit.

Pit wants to help and not annoy! Therefore, the penguin takes care not to disturb you during a presentation or other full screen applications.

Joining the fme family

We already noticed during the pilot phase that our break time penguin is well received by the company. Many colleagues followed our call to install the program with a few clicks. The feedback was very positive and provided a good basis for further activities in the form of small system updates. The pilot phase was finished and my fme-wide application was completed.

… and so a little penguin has kept fme AG on the go since then!
 

Iven Ahrens, apprentice at fme AG
 

*****
 

If you want to know more: Here are a few detailed information
• The program can be started immediately after the installation by clicking the Windows key and entering break time Penguin Pit.
• By default, a full-screen message is sent every two hours, refusing any input and only disappears when the screen is locked. Alternatively, you can press a button that temporarily hides the full screen message.
• Furthermore, every 90 minutes selected banners appear which receive small tips on health at the workplace.
• All settings can be changed by right-clicking on Pit in the taskbar and pressing »Open settings«.