Imagine being told you had to work overtime at an office to do something that seems really trivial, like simply moving a computer mouse every couple minutes. Would you be happy to comply and rack up extra overtime, or would you be really frustrated that you were required to stay at work doing something so boring?

In this story, a company has been paying employees to work overtime to move a mouse, but 5 minutes with the IT department changed all of that.

Let’s read all the details.

A Tale of Overtime Mouse Management

I started working in the IT department of a local company, that my dad works for. Yay nepotism!

Anyways, I’m in my second week of work, and have been through my fair share of software installations, virus removals, and hard drive re-imaging.

Anyways, I got a phone call today that went along the line of:

Phone rings

The caller explained the problem.

Hello, this is Gohack from the helpdesk. How may I help you?

I hear something resembling English coming from the phone. I’ll do my best to interpret what he said.

“Hey this is such and such from the (insert office name here) I’m having an issue with computers shutting off.”

He went on to explain that they were doing something with Adobe that needed an extended amount of time to run. The problem with this was that the computer would go to sleep or lock after a certain period of time. Whatever he was doing would take multiple hours to complete.

The caller seemed desperate for help.

My reply of course was immediately:

Have you tried editing the power options?

He replied:

Uhh we aren’t able to change that.

or something along those lines that made me think that maybe that was locked on most of the company computers. He went on to explain on how they really needed help with this, because they were resorting to paying people overtime to stay after work and move the mouse every couple of minutes.

He had a suggestion.

I think a small part of me died at that moment, but I went on to suggest a free program called insomnia for his computer.

He was worried about my boss getting mad at him for installing unwanted software.

I told him to wait on the line while I discussed it with my boss.

After a quick chat with my boss, where he explained that all the computers had admin privileges for some reason. I wanted to put my head through a wall.

It took longer to fix than he thought it should, but it was still fixed in 5 minutes.

Who knows how long they had been paying someone to move a mouse every so often.

I walked him through the power options and set up a profile that did not shut off after an allotted amount of time.

It took a little while because he seemed to be a little slow to locate what I was describing. Eventually he managed to get through it though.

I’m still kind of amazed a 5 minute phone call could save the company thousands of dollars. Paid to move a mouse… Sign me up.

What’s obvious to tech support isn’t always obvious to anyone else. Paying someone to move a mouse is pretty ridiculous though.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Here’s a story about a computer that is never used and never sleeps.

Turning off the screensaver would’ve been so much easier.

Here’s another workaround.

Yes, this would be the smart way to deal with the overtime.

Here’s another workaround.

Some people get overtime for the craziest reasons!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.