I'm surprised none of the comments (so far) are critical of the author. What's the point of mooching if you're not going to use that time productively? Eventually he'll have to find a new job, and not very many places want candidates with 5 years experience in pretending to work.<p>I can understand a few weeks of slacking, but any longer than that and I would go stir-crazy. Instead of playing games or browsing the web, he could have used his idle time to find an interesting job or hobby. He could have read books or learned a new language (computer or human). He had an opportunity to make money while improving himself, and he squandered it.<p>Edit: I think it's likely the story is exaggerated, but I've been in a similar situation. I used my free time to interview for other jobs and study/practice/learn. It's so easy to fall into the trap of wasting time in exactly the same way every day.
Is the moral of the story that everyone has the same useless role? And that the need to BS is a primitive, corporate instinct where everyone ends up sending globes to each other.
This is why I find it funny that civil servants have such a bad reputation. This sort of thing happens in all big corporations and government is just another big corporation.
Something similar happened to me, but it didn't have a happy ending.<p>My last year in college I had to stay for fall semester because of scheduling issues with a required class, so I needed a job for a summer. A local firm -- and let's name names: Marshall Erdman, since purchased by Cogdell Spencer <a href="http://www.cogdell.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cogdell.com/</a> -- offered me a programming job. I accepted about 4 weeks before I started, and in doing so, turned down other job offers.<p>My fourth working day, my boss, her boss, and an entire wing of people were laid off. In typical classy fashion, people figured out who was going when they couldn't login to outlook. Somehow they forgot about me though. So I literally spent the next 6 working days finishing already assigned work and coming to work in a wing of the office that was literally deserted except for me.<p>Finally, I walked into the president's office and asked what I should do. I got a general, "huh?" reception; HR fired me that day. Of course, these assholes gave me no severance or anything else -- they just said, "Oops, our bad." Since I was in college, I didn't exactly have much savings and normally by the end of the semester I was living paycheck to paycheck so this couldn't have come at a worse time.<p>I managed to string together enough jobs to make rent, but it was a close call. And employers wonder why employees don't feel any loyalty :rolleyes:<p>I applaud the author of the post above; I should have done the same thing.
awesome read. very funny in parts.<p>a couple of gems:<p><i>'I was talking, nodding absent-mindedly to myself, engaged in a pretend conversation with my pants'</i><p>and<p><i>'Nothing had prepared me for a meeting. Therefore I decided on the smartest possible thing to do - ignore it like that lump on my balls.'</i>