How Some People Get Away with Doing Nothing at Work

Avoiding work is a full-time job, OP. It sounds exhausting, lol.

Anyone who works a full-time job knows people who slack off and never get fired. Companies don't like to fire people especially ones they've trained or ones who hold degrees and certificates. It seems that the only way to get fired is just not show up or act violent or steal something.

Hey, if you can beat the system at their own game go for it

I ran a pub in the UK for 7 years and nobody noticed that I only worked one hour a day at the most. The salary was £60,000 ($75,000) a year in the mid 1980's.

The cleaners had their own keys and accepted deliveries, the chef ran the kitchen, staff ran the bar and the cash register reordered the stock automatically. As long as we were making a hefty profit the company didn't care.

I quit out of sheer boredom in the end.

R4 good for you! The pandemic has completely altered how people view work…and it’s healthy. OP, unless you’re a business owner, why do you care if people are screwing over corporations? They’ve screwed over workers for decades. And it’s nit staff that’s causing companies to demand return to office…it’s mainly petty HR drones who refuse to believe the world has changed.

I don't understand the problem. It's been fairly standard practice for years, decades for full-time or mostly so home workers to have some some of work product accountability.

I did it full-time for 20+ years, not without some hiccups along the way, but I would have a year to plot out executing and managing new projects: by September one large product that involved scheduling other staff in and out of the project over those months, then some analysis for new product development in October-November, and in December some solo project advance work for the next year's big project. There were measurements of how many components and what percentage was completed that I'd report every week, and files that showed up in a preliminary or final state.

Some years I had to scramble more than was comfortable for some ambitious goal, other years the schedule was more leisurely. But there wasn't any way that I could go too many years with no one taking notice that I had not generated any work product. I rated my staff on combined quantity and quality of work, each in their own part of the world. Had I been better at a keyboard I might have had one hand up my ass the whole time for all anyone knew, or worked bizarre hours, or played Methodist hymns loudly while fucking between 3-5each afternoon. A mouse-mover was never going to do my work for me. Somewhere along the line it was 8ncumbent upon me to keep check of where my staff were, what there numbers were, and to pass those along with my own numbers to someone else.

It may be fine to work from Portugal, the important things are 1) that you are working and producing something, and 2) that anyone contacting you can expect a reasonably prompt and informed reply to "what are you doing?"

What kind of jobs can not be done at all with no 9ne missing any product of some sort?

The business about when people work may be important with a work time, reasonably regular hours of availability are very useful and multi-time zones are easily sorted out.

If only the actual work part were so simple as the mouse-mover thing.

I can’t speak for people slacking off more since the pandemic, but I think slacking off looks different now. Pre-Covid, I was generally in an office from 9-5. If I was caught up on work, or waiting for others to get back to me on things, I made an effort to look busy. Maybe organize my email folders, some online shopping, chatting with co-workers until the magic hour of 5 pm. No one was watching me closely and I didn’t punch a time clock, it was just one of those expected things in the corporate world. Now, working from home a few days a week, when I have some down time, I can throw some laundry in the machine, do a quick workout or take the dog for a short walk. I think the myth is that within the corporate world. most jobs don’t take 7-8 hours a day to do well, yet we are expected to be present for the full day in some form.