
The Life of a Forgotten employee - jcslzr
http://shii.org/knows/American_Dream
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AngryParsley
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.

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.

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.

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dagw
>not very many places want candidates with 5 years experience in pretending to
work.

Except as far as any one else was concerned he had 5 years of experience
"running the company" and he had the Vice President as a reference to back him
up on that. I don't think it would be any harder for him to get a job than if
he'd spent those 5 years actually doing his job

~~~
AngryParsley
How does the saying go? I think it's, "The half-life of a CS degree is 7
years." (Yes I know he got his masters in physics in the story.)

Being out of practice, he'd probably have trouble answering interview
questions and writing code.

~~~
dagw
He's a manager, he doesn't have to write code. He just has to show up at
meetings and tell people to tell people to write code.

~~~
gaius
Dagw if I've told you once I've told you a thousand times: write some code.
And where's that TPS report?

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lvecsey
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.

~~~
jamesbressi
The truth is scarier than the most outlandish lie.

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forinti
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.

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jdietrich
I believe you have my stapler?

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snikolov
It's kind of sad that it goes from 'struggling to comprehend superstring
theory' to being an unknown speck at <random company>.

~~~
houseabsolute
Agreed, it was a waste of time to try to understand a theory that predicts
nothing and can't be tested.

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stevenwei
Entertaining...I'm pretty sure it's fictional though.

~~~
metamemetics
I'm not so sure, there have been more ridiculous true stories on SA.

~~~
metamemetics
Correction: The user's name was "moonshine" as stated in the article and he
has admitted to making it all up before.

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robgough
I can't decide if I want this to be real or not.

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minalecs
great story.. long, but worth the read.

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starkfist
The book "Whatever" by Michel Houellebecq does this much better.

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earl
Something similar happened to me, but it didn't have a happy ending.

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
<http://www.cogdell.com/> \-- offered me a programming job. I accepted about 4
weeks before I started, and in doing so, turned down other job offers.

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.

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.

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:

I applaud the author of the post above; I should have done the same thing.

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eli_s
awesome read. very funny in parts.

a couple of gems:

 _'I was talking, nodding absent-mindedly to myself, engaged in a pretend
conversation with my pants'_

and

 _'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.'_

