I've had several days where I literally didn't send a single email or do anything at all at my current job. The wonders of WFH for a bullshit job
i've had so many days like this where i instead did the dishes, vacuumed the house, dusted, washed the cars, washed the dogs, did laundry, picked up lunch, left early for an appointment, etc, etc. it has been really special. i will miss these days.
I had a WFH job where I think my manager forgot what I was supposed to be doing
When I was quitting my last bakery job, I had a shift where I drove around on a forklift while hitting my weed pen and then I snuck off to look for cool rocks outside and I took a nap.
I've played 40 hours of video games and done zero hours of work pretty consistently for the past 4 weeks. if that's not it, I don't know what is.
Edit: y'all are too kind 🥰 . but while I don't feel "guilty" per se, it does piss me off that there are many comrades--on this site, even--who are struggling to get by while I'm getting paid very well to do quite literally nothing. If you're curious, about my job vs what I do with my time, my title is Senior Director of Software Engineering. So... yeah. we do be living in a society.
I can't get away with this as a junior dev (too many small tasks which have visibility by project managers), but there are some days I say fuck it and jiggle the mouse while playing rocket league.
I took a break from gaming to write some code this week.
I meter out my productivity because they have refused to hire more people or give me any assistance. So, I now set the pace at what I can sustain, after 4 years of burnout cycles.
I feel guilty for doing it, but I was promised a team of people that would help share the load, and I have cycled through like 4 contractors and 2 full time employees and two years later I'm still picking apart their pull requests because they keep making the same mistakes over and over.
The contractors learn a little, then quit or leave, and I'm expected to just teach the replacement, over and over.
I have job security, but I'm just continuing to automate more and more of the work and make it more complex and my co workers can't keep up, but we are able to deploy fleets of devices on faster and faster schedules and they just keep moving up the project schedules to match every timesaving automation I build.
So now I meter out my productivity. Because if they keep moving the schedules up, eventually they'll move it below a certain threshold where issues in the physical deployment will cause timelines to slip and they'll go fucking nuclear, because apparently a date slip is far worse than it taking 6 fucking months to rack and stack and deploy something. What matters was that it matched the schedule they pull out of their asses at the start.
The whole month of march I was getting 2 paychecks for doing no work. Job A was paralyzed because we just merged and the leadership had no idea what to do, so we just sat around. I started Job B at the same time and they weren't ready for me yet, so I just sat around. This lasted an entire month, it ruled.
I thought that was part of the deal for work? You don't do anything on the first week/month or the last week/month.
There's usually an onboarding process for at least a week. Mine took a few days and then I wasn't put on a team until 3 weeks later.
Our coffee shop flooded, but not just your normal flood. Shitty piss water started flowing out of our neighboring store’s wall and they couldn’t shut it off. Called the owner and told them I was going to close shop but they said no. I said “ok, fine then.” and locked the doors to the store and just didn’t serve anybody for the next 6 and a half hours. I’m not serving coffee to human beings while our store floods with feces. I just sat in the front window safe from the doodoowater and did homework. Owner called me, absolutely livid that the store was shut down and threatened to fire me so I told them to go for it.
i don't even know, i type random words after : and pick the emotes i like. in this case, i typed "boss"
Similar but slightly less gross for me. Our whole shopping complex flooded and I was stuck in the store, sat on the counter reading comics and smoking cigarettes I stole from the shop next door. I was there for my entire shift before I got rescued. Minimum wage to literally sit on a counter top crossed legged. I peed into the flood too
Early in the pandemic, management didn't know how to manage us when we switched from on-site to hybrid, so on my days at home I just sat in my underwear playing video games on the clock for entire workweeks at a time.
I've had plenty of days where I didn't do shit, but my least productive day is one where I achieved negative productivity by making bad changes that took myself and several other engineers the rest of the week to fix
One of my EMT roles was on an airbase. I was the only 24/7 medic for 8000~ people, but that either meant I was being constantly called out or not at all. One day my only call was being safety standby for a suspicious package that might be a bomb. It was in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut and we only had one EOD technician covering the entire region. Because I figured what the hell I've never seen a bomb before and it wasn't cordoned off by police, I walked up to the parking lot and looked at it. It was a box with a trashbag inside. I had to sit there in an ambulance for six hours waiting for an EOD tech to declare it to be a non-explosive trashbag before I could go back to the station. The rest of the night was spent playing Civilisation IV because nobody had an emergency.
Literally just slept on the floor all day.
Job sucked for a bunch of other reasons but it was extremely hands-off, so sometimes the workload was just that light.
I worked at a call center that would warm-call and try to sell annual subscriptions to a musical theater to people. I worked there for two weeks and only sold one subscription, so that's two full weeks of no productivity. That kind of work stresses me out the most so I'd take smoking breaks every 20m. On week 2 I would come with a bottle of coke spiked with Johny Walker Red and sip on it during the day, to either loosen my tongue up or just to not give a shit. Nobody noticed but I did get terminated for never selling anything. Our most productive employee was constantly high, we watched The Harder They Come (1972) at his place once, nice guy.
towards the end of my time at Activision i was showing up, just listening to David Graeber audiobooks on youtube, and not talking to anyone
Recently I woke up for work, got ready for the day, logged into Teams, smoked some weed and then then decided to go back to bed. I got up at 2:30 PM and smoked more weed and spent the last two hours occasionally responding to messages whenever I died in Elden Ring.
Usually my unproductive days start with a panic attack and just... continue that way, but this one was just for me. It ruled.
