[REPOST]
As part of the plan to return to office post covid, my company has done a lot of re-designating of who can permanently work from home, who can hybrid, etc. I really wanted to work from home full time. I hate the office with a burning passion - it’s distracting, it’s a long commute, there’s no benefit to being there, so on and so forth. I’d just rather be at home.
Well when we thought May was going to be go back to office time they started giving out the new designations. I got designated as in office full time. It made no sense to me. I work on a team of 8 people and each of us is in a different office somewhere in the country. I’ve literally never been to an in person meeting or needed to do in person work in 3 years at this company. Every single other person on my team got designated to work from home. So I brought it up with my boss and asked to work from home. When I started at this company and lived elsewhere I got to work from home for 4 months before I moved and the past 14 months during covid have been at home, so 18/36 months at the company have been WFH. What I was told is that I go idle too often in chat to trust to work from home.
Basically we have a company wide IM system that shows you as available, idle, or in a meeting. If you don’t touch your keyboard for 5 minutes you show as idle. So they’ve decided to use this as a measure for who is working and who isn’t. The thing is, like many people in many types of jobs, I don’t have shit to do for a full 8 hours every single day. The amount of work I have to do on a typical day takes 3-5 hours of actual attention. There simply isn’t something to do ALL the time. My performance numbers actually went up working from home, by all objective KPI numbers I’m a better worker at home. In fact, in the KPIs that I don’t flat out lead the team in, I come in second. There isn’t work to do that I’m neglecting or procrastinating, when something comes up I simply do it until it’s done or until I can’t do anymore due to waiting on someone else then stop. And I’ve done that method long enough that my work queue stays empty because I worked to get my queue down to the point where when something comes up I can immediately address it and be done with it. But because I have other ways to spend my time in down time instead of messing around online at my cube pretending to be working meaning I show idle more often, I’m a worse worker apparently. I was told if it weren’t for that they would let me work at home.
So I wrote a 6 line powershell script that virtually inputs the period key every 4 minutes that starts running every day at 8am and stops at 5pm. So now I literally never go idle. I do the same amount of work and still read books, watch tv, and play video games on the side. But I have a shiny green check next to my name all day.
Because of covid complications they eventually said no going back until after labor day. I just had a meeting with my boss and he said over this time they’ve noticed I go idle a lot less than I used to so they’re changing my designation to work from home, all because of a little icon in some software. This concludes my TED talk on why low to middle level managers are the dumbest, most useless do-nothing positions in all of corporate America
EDIT: I do not need to be told to buy a mouse jiggler for the 30th time. I’m aware of what they are. This cost me no money and achieves the same thing. Why would I pay to achieve an effect I’ve already achieved for free?
EDIT 2: A lot of people are understandably asking for the script:
$dummyshell = New-Object -com "Wscript.shell"
$dummyshell.sendkeys(".")
That’s the backbone of the whole thing. There’s different ways to implement it with for loops or scheduled tasks or whatever, that parts up to you, but that’s all the powershell needs at it’s core to accomplish this. A lot of people have pointed out that sending Insert or F13 instead of period would be better so change that up if you want.
To all the people commenting that I’m a shitty employee and obviously trying to insult me over it: I wish I could make you feel just how little I care. To all the people implying a work day isn’t valid if you aren’t at 100% capacity from 8 - 5, keep it up, you truly are an ideal employee…to them. Enjoy the taste of leather, bootlickers
Edit 3: Some of y’all would be pissed as fuck if I explained the concept of firefighters to you
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He sounds smart, I bet he didn’t get to stay in management for long
That’s actually pretty smart!
People in the office work the same amount of time. The rest of the time they are talking to other people distracting them from their work or their pretending to work. These antiquated ideas of productivity, primarily working in an office makes you more productive, need to die.
but the chatter makes you “productive”! …somehow
A good example of how capitalists want exclusive ownership of your time, even to the detriment of productivity.
No kidding! It’s like they don’t even care about profit, they just want to hurt people
What’s with managers and micromanaging? Its as if people have nothing better to do.
they need to do something otherwise the IM goes idle!
The 40 hour work week is outdated. I could easily get away with a 32 hour work week and get all of my work done. Here I am having been doing it the hard way and actually moving my mouse cursor every 10 minutes so my laptop doesn’t go to sleep.
have you considered a mouse jiggler? :)
I joke with my wife that I need one of those bird fluid bouncing toys like Homer had in the simpsons
I’m a remote employee in a similar position, I also finish my work in about 3-4 hours in any given day (mileage varies). My performance reports have been at a consecutive 100% and I don’t see why I should change my ways. Honestly I don’t give a damn if people think I’m slacking off if I go and do some gardening during the day, if anything finishing my work early just makes me very productive :)
as long as you have good bosses who don’t see time-in-chair as a metric of performance…
We use Teams and if I notice that I’ve been on the yellow idle icon for too long I’ll give my mouse a jiggle, at which point I see all my colleagues are on idle too… it’s a very relaxed environment. I hope you can continue working remotely in the future!
The problem with Team is it goes yellow when IT’S idle, not you. That was a big adjustment when we went to Teams, understanding that someone can be furiously working away at their computer while Teams is reporting yellow. You send them a message and BAM it goes green when they see the notification and read your message. Pretty ridiculous, really, since the bulk of the software is all Microsoft…why can’t Outlook tell Teams, “Hey, she’s writing an email, the icon says green, silly.”
I think the standard trick is to use the “Away” status permanently, so it’ll never switch you to Idle!
Yeah, I think part of the “back to the office” push is coming from companies that aren’t smart enough to objectively measure productivity. That, or they’re using “return to office” as a way to pressure certain employees into quitting (which seems to be the case here).
I’ve heard that - in some cases, at least - its about management being afraid they’ll be deemed worthless when they can’t walk from cube to cube to check on people as if they’re cracking the whip. Which is silly, to be honest - there’s a place and function for managers and they don’t have to be breathing down your neck in person to fulfill those functions.
To add to what @_bug0ut said, some managers are just on a power trip, and they can’t be the high school bully if you’re not around. Most of my department is 100% on site reporting rather than meeting daily in the office every morning. The only time they ever make someone report to the office is when they want to keep an eye on them and “discipline” them.
My boss was all 100% for stay WFH. All of us are in different countries so it would literally affect 5 people total. Nope. They had a big higher ups meeting with just him and suddenly he has no good arguments for it but he is 100% for “we will all go back to the office”. I have a few guesses as to why he changed his mind and most of them start with: “They told you that if we didn’t go back they didn’t need you anymore.”
You should get a mouse jiggler.
angry eye twitch
Probably ought to get something that physically moves the mouse then. It’s pretty common for companies to install software that monitors running programs etc., and if they keep track of how often you go idle on Teams they probably would find it suspicious if you have mouse jiggler running on your computer.
Mouse jiggler that sits underneath your mouse. Plug your mouse into the work computer, plug the jiggler into something else.
I do the same thing in a python script, move the mouse every 5 mins. So slack is never away. Fuck micromanagement
Odds are you can just send a “null” key instead of “.” And it will still work just as well without actually typing anything. I used to do the same thing to keep an application active at my old job. It was nice because even when it was active I could still use the computer like normal without stopping the script.
There used to be an app called Caffeine which, if I remember correctly, would trigger the F13 key, which is coded into the kayboard standard but rarely exists on keyboards (and hence acts as a de facto “null” key).
Toggling Scroll Lock on and off every five seconds is what I do. This way I can see the little light on the keyboard to confirm the script is running.
Yeah, corporations :rolls_eyes:
Heh, back in my call centre days we used this neat little app called Caffeine. No installation required, just double click and stay online for the whole shift.
Some places block .exes now so that doesn’t always work.
Like my office. We got new thinclients and someone who doesn’t know how the rest works decided that these clients have to lock the user out after one minute of inactivity.
Since I very often read articles or forum posts or are in remote sessions to get shown by a user what kind of issue they encounter, I constantly get booted out. I tried caffeine and it doesn’t work. So now I constantly have to tab ctrl… It’s very helpful when I’m reading…
One minute?! jesus
It’s as fun as it sounds…
I wound up installing the “Move Mouse” software to keep Microsoft Teams active. Seems to do the trick.
I used to show up as idle a lot because I have communications stuff like Teams on my (very slow, old, underpowered) work-owned laptop, and I do my actual work from my home PC. So the more I’m working, the less likely I am to show up as being active on Teams. But managers don’t understand logic. They only understand a little green check next to your name. So… Move Mouse it is.
I used to do the same, with the exact piece of software, when I was a contractor for a big enterprise that didn’t give me sh*t to do.
Even after asking multiple times for some assignments and integrating myself into the daily standups, manager meetings and made myself “part of the team” as much as possible, they didn’t use me or my skills.
So naturally I went Eff that and just didn’t care anymore. Whenever someone had an assignment for me to do, I’d get the job done in no time and go back to “busy idling”
Some places don’t let you install your own software, you’re lucky!
I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before they realize their oversight though. So thank you in advance for the powershell script ;)
A Mouse Jägermeister would definitely make your day go more smoothly.
I sometimes miss the social interaction of being in the office, but overall, working from home is fantastic. I hope it never gets taken away.
I hope it never gets taken away
Sadly, any companies are trying really hard to take it away.
Have you thought about getting a… checks notes… “mouse juggler”?
In the early days of the pandemic, I got a low-tech version of that: I had one of those electric desk fans that move from left to right and back again to keep a room cool. I took an old wire coat hanger and bent it to attach one part to the fan, and one part to my mouse. As the fan moved, so did my mouse, so I always appeared active in Teams.
Software solutions like powershell scripts are neat, but they can be detected by IT. They can’t really detect a hardware solution without a lot of digging though, and as long as I’m still getting my work done, they have no reason to dig.
I quickly stopped caring about it though. Like OP, I go inactive for long periods of time, but fortunately, my manager is smart enough to recognize that my work’s still getting done, so he doesn’t care at all. Same thing for my direct reports: As long as we continue to meet deadlines, I don’t care if they’re working 40 hours / week or 10 hours / week.
As a fed, anything plugged into a port is automatically logged and checked, and can result in a nastygram or more serious infraction. We periodically get emails about inappropriate connections - we can’t even use the USB to charge our work phones.
Then came the email that told us they knew about X instances of mouse jigglers and told us to cut it out. I wonder if managers got notified.
you can always make a manual one and have a separate gadget moving your mouse physically. that can’t be detected.
You can buy USB-powered manual mouse jigglers. Just plug it into something that isn’t your work PC. Set your work mouse on top. Voila.
Luckily my boss and colleagues all recognize Teams limitations on the idle status and we just get our work done. I’m not going to attempt to game it - but then I work when I say I’m working and the job gets done, so management isn’t breathing down our necks about idle status.
I think OP should really get a, what were those damn things called again? Ah, mouse jiggler!
Jiggle. Mouse jiggler.
How did they track it? Does Teams/Slack have a special way to report that?
