There are two
definitions of
occupational therapy:
1. The
original meaning of the word is the type of
therapy organized for
prisoners and people with a
psychological disorder. The aim of the therapy is to keep the people busy with some sort of activity like making the pegs manually,
knitting or
pottery and making figures out of clay.
2. Nowadays it is used in a broader sense and with some degree of
sarcasm:
occupational therapy is applicable to
anybody who's doing something that doesn't really make sense, isn't particularly useful, or some activity you like performing but
nobody cares about at all...(does this sound familiar?)
Example: I've set up a
webserver on one of the machines in the testlab. The site is only accessible via our
intranet, and the information on the pages is only useful to my
colleges who are sitting right beside me... but it gave me something to do to kill my more than sufficient amount of
slacktime at work.