Ah, I can relate to that story. It reminded me of a position I held many years ago.
Realizing what a breeze the actual work was, I made the mistake of asking permission to run a side gig, only realizing later, after being told "no", that everyone else there already had a side gig going, including everyone up my leadership chain.
There were a bunch of different phases during my time there that were pretty funny though, like the "OK fine I'll slack off" phase, the "make every new and interesting hobby relevant to a work project so that I can do it at work" phase, the "nah let's locate and polish every turd in the office" phase (every line of the world's most boring HTML documentation passed W3C validation after that), the "exploring office gossip in encrypted chat with IT guy" phase, the "working my way through Project Gutenberg" phase, and the "excited to try everyone else's favorite lunch spot" phase.
I left for similar reasons, the future was coming and it seemed brighter in almost any other position. The skills I decided to develop were useful later, but it was a net negative for me.
Realizing what a breeze the actual work was, I made the mistake of asking permission to run a side gig, only realizing later, after being told "no", that everyone else there already had a side gig going, including everyone up my leadership chain.
There were a bunch of different phases during my time there that were pretty funny though, like the "OK fine I'll slack off" phase, the "make every new and interesting hobby relevant to a work project so that I can do it at work" phase, the "nah let's locate and polish every turd in the office" phase (every line of the world's most boring HTML documentation passed W3C validation after that), the "exploring office gossip in encrypted chat with IT guy" phase, the "working my way through Project Gutenberg" phase, and the "excited to try everyone else's favorite lunch spot" phase.
I left for similar reasons, the future was coming and it seemed brighter in almost any other position. The skills I decided to develop were useful later, but it was a net negative for me.