Imagine having a 9 to 5 job where you work from home. If you weren’t busy that whole time, would you still sit at your computer waiting for something to do, or would you walk away from your computer and do something else?

In this story, one woman really wants to continue to work from home post Covid and is disappointed when she’s told she needs to work in the office.

When she finds out why she was told to work in the office, she has an idea that just might work!

Let’s read the whole 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.

She didn’t get her wish.

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.

This really doesn’t make any sense.

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.

She found out why she was designated as working from the office.

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.

This is why she goes idle…

The thing is, like many people in many types of jobs, I don’t have stuff 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.

She is a very efficient worker.

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.

She came up with a workaround.

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.

Now, she can work from home.

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

That was clever and effective!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person’s brain hurts.

Another person shares what they do to prevent going idle.

Here’s another effective approach.

Yes, it was the perfect method to make the bosses happy.

Managers don’t always look at the most important metrics.

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.