Dealing with unreasonable managers is exhausting.

In this man’s case, his boss didn’t want to let him work from home because he “was idle too often” in the chat. When he was honest about why that was, it backfired, so he had to come up with another idea.

He actually ended up coming up with an ingenious solution.

Let’s read the story.

You can’t continue working from home because you go idle in chat too often

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.

But it was going to be a challenging endeavor.

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.

They wanted to keep an eye on him, apparently.

Every single other person on my team was 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 working from home.

But his boss didn’t trust him.

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 things to do for a full 8 hours every single day.

Keeping it real. Too bad most managers don’t get that.

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.

He is baffled by their lack of understanding of this.

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 it anymore due to waiting on someone else.

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.

He is efficient. But being honest is frowned upon in his company.

But because I have other ways to spend my time in downtime 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.

Oh well, time to get petty.

So I wrote a 6-line PowerShell script that virtually inputs the period key every 4 minutes that starts running every day at 8 am and stops at 5 pm.

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.

That’s what they needed to have their minds at ease.

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.

The end justified the means in this case, and he got what he wanted.

Let’s see what Reddit has to say about this.

A reader shares their thoughts.

This commenter shares their experience.

A recommendation.

Another reader chimes in.

Someone shares a similar story.

Step by step.

He also knows this: it’s better to work smart than hard.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.