When I was cashiering a lot at my work, certain mornings would be dead and I was left standing there for hours at a time with little to do but wait for the lunch rush. This gave me time to pursue my own interests with the somewhat severe limitation of having to stand inside a small box and drop whatever I was doing if someone happened to walk up. Among the activities I pursued; counter-top push ups, hand strengthening exercises, secretly reading the newspaper, staring off into space, making rubber band slingshots, writing the alphabet with my left hand and drawing pictures of juice bottles. None of those quite met up to the ideal register dead time activity, which is unit origami. I dropped $4 on a few packages of paper from a dollar store, put them in my apron pocket and went to work folding hundreds of self-similar pieces in order to build shapes. It's a cheap, repetitive, satisfying little activity to engage in. It can be dropped and picked back up in no time, and gives the brain something to stay occupied with in an environment conducive to partial - if not total - atrophy.
Try it out for yourself when you have time. Here's the instruction for building a Sonobe unit, which makes the shapes above. I'm not on register all that much anymore, so I may not see my dream of building an origami Buckyball come to fruition, though that seems an ok tradeoff in the end.
