That would have completed the vibe, but I only met the one dude and they were still getting uniform service... so at least they had new threads.

Welcome to the abyss of middle managers.

I had a few years as almost Wally.

I did my work, but at my own pace, set my own hours, could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted as long as stuff kept working.

Was nice at the time, but did stagnate my career.

I’ve been working on a new system in the Office  lab for a customer.  Was in there for months.  Come in the back door, go to the lab, work all day and go home.  Sometimes my boss would stop in to BS.  Sometimes people would stop by to go to lunch.  It was awesome.

I see some employees who are such a liability but who possess the requisite diversity points that they cannot be fired, so they essentially settle into a job of doing almost nothing.

I suppose that's not exactly the same but it is close...

Happened to me. Started a pilot position at a new airline.

Training was backed up so after the first week of safety stuff I got sent home for six weeks with pay. Thought that was great but took advantage of it to study.

Go back to training, day two of sims the simulator broke earlier and nobody called to have it fixed. My instructor did and it was out of service for 24 hours. They booked the exact number of sims I was required to do and two for check rides. I completed the first check ride but with the cancellation there was no availability to complete the second. They tried to squeeze me in later that day but couldn’t and told me to go home. For the next month I called every couple days to ask about availability.

Finally the person in charge of scheduling got sick of me and others in this position, and told all of us not to call or email her. She knew who/where we were and would get us in ASAP.

Then she got fired.

Took them three more months to find, hire, and train a replacement. Then they found me and scrambled to get me in and finish my two hour check ride.

So basically I had the whole summer 2017 off with pay. Bought a grill, and spent the whole time grilling with my girlfriend and her three year old daughter who I adopted in 2018.

Then in November 2018 I decided to “bid reserve” which means I decided not to have a set schedule but be on call. As a reserve pilot we had a daily list of pilots used to cover flights. They are called in seniority order, lowest to highest. In happened to be at the top of the list. Instead of taking FMLA, I sat at the top of the reserve list for four months. My son was born at the end of December. I was called in to fly one flight in November, then none for December or January. I went flying voluntarily in February because we’re required to log 3 landings every 90 days or go re-qual in the sim, and I didn’t want to do that. Was awesome being home for two months straight with my new son.

I caught my daughter telling her friends I “don’t have to go to work anymore” lol

I work for one of the airlines, and with biometric time clocks the time nazis will know if you're not at work.

However, occasionally a mechanic will damage an aircraft or do something bad enough that they're sent home with pay during an investigation that can sometimes take one or two weeks.

I've seen the retarded managers forget them at home, getting paid until someone coincidentally asks how they're doing.

I was that guy the last 3 years before I retired. I did long range planning and wrote the plan to close the office. Well when you do planning on a 3 to 5 year planning horizon there isn’t much for you to do after you turn in the plan to close the office in 3 years. I was actually bored and tired of surfing the internet by the time I closed the door and turned off the lights.

Will do, thanks.

I actually worked a couple years in a lab where I was basically left to my own devices. Eventually, I got board as hell and quit. In retrospect, I should have kept that job, it wasn't bad money either.

There's only so much web surfing, music downloading, video gaming you can do before going stir crazy.

Don't get me wrong, I did my work, but 90% of my time there was spent babysitting lab equipment while it ran automated tests.

Large company I worked for outsourced the IT department.  A couple of guys got 'missed' so they stayed on the regular payroll as employees.  Basically they were very specific area support.  They kept an amazingly low profile so the 'mistake' would not be discovered.

I know a couple other IT guys that don't even have offices.  They 'work from home'.  Being Server Guys, they pretty much only work remotely during maintainece windows, hop on a teleconference every now and then.  Must be nice.  One was joking about how he had 50 weeks of vacation a year, only had to work 2.  

Normally the “forgot he worked here” phenomenon is generally government workers. They get to be a protected class and it’s easier to make them the assistant director of stuff over yonder than to fire them.

It's happened to me a few times at my current job.

Working 10 years security, and private investigation did that for me.  Nights weekends holidays no supervisors.  Read many books, wasted much life resources.

I had this happen to me in the 6th Grade. Basically the teacher was scatterbrained and probably batshit crazy and she would disappear all day to go work on the school talent show. This went on for almost an entire semester. She also thought kids learned better if they didn’t have to sit at desks, so we would just sit there all day at old 1960s dinette sets playing Gameboys. There were never any negative consequences as far as I know. It was the weirdest fucking thing.

I still have dreams where I’m in that classroom dicking around waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never does.

Hospitals should have a quote system. No more then 1 administrator per 50 employees.

I swear to god we are short staffed everywhere but we have a new diversity officer, New inclusion officer, New head of retention, and new officer in charge of special management.

I heard about a guy who worked in IT at a large multinational oil company handling their cybersecurity stuff that didn’t come into the office for something like 10 years, literally the reason he showed up was for a retirement orientation seminar.

A lady I worked with literally fucked shit up to the point she had only the most menial responsibilities. She was supposed to book a whole week of hotels for a Field trip group of 20 and only booked one day, so her duties were reduced to only local classes and taking bookings. Then eventually she fucked something else up so she was reduced again to only taking bookings. Her hours were supposed to be 6:45 to 3:45, but she rarely was there before 7:30 and always left at 3:45-4, after bullshitting with the production people for two hours after lunch, shuffling back to her office to check her email, and then proclaiming how busy she’d been all day as she walked out the door.

I saw a documentary about this. Apparently some of those Japanese workers sit around for years as a fuck you to the company. They aren’t allowed on the Internet—they just have to sit quietly together in a room.

this sums up our healthcare system

It's how I started working from home. Survived a bunch of layoffs and reorgs. In the end I was the only one local to the office on 3rd shift. Even my new boss was remote. Just stopped going in.

That boss was sacked and I told the new one I work remote. No questions asked. Haven't seen a coworker in person for a few years now.

.
Did I tell you about the time I was working at TROKA in the middle of a mountain with my sole duty being to remotely push the ROK general's microphone button during video conferencing?

Needed to somehow psychicly know when he was going to speak because he never signalled.

There were 3 of us and nobody else there cared what we did so long as one of us was present on site 24/7.

Happened to me in Iraq.  Entire deployment.  Left to my own devices.  No supervision, and no report-to-work time.  I worked alone; away from my unit.

I used to work with multiple guys who fit the bill.

I met a few like that including SES at the Pentagon

Two different managers were put on special assignments.  One was biding his time until he found another job, the other one was near retirement but took a while for him to catch on that no-one was reporting to him anymore and he had been pushed to the side.  He was an abusive boss, and was lucky he got pushed to the side and allowed to finish his time to retire.  No-one above him even told him he was no longer in charge of a program.

A co-worker basically did it to himself.  He hated all of us and isolated himself, since he had his Phd and thought the work was below him, so didn't do any work for over a year.  He left of his own accord for a better job, then quit after three days and wanted to come back and work with us again, promising he would change and be better.  We didn't hire him back.  I spent 7 months completing his backlog after he left, in addition to my job, until we hired a replacement.

You know what's so funny about that? It's funny because it's true. That happens. It happened to me once.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

I have a window seat office now with half the responsibility and I had to fight for it and use my seniority to get it.

Bitches wanted the easy life without paying their dues...

And education system.

We had a "seasoning program" in the USAF Reserves where you would be assigned to an active duty unit for up to 6 months after graduating tech school. As an SNCO I did not report to anyone, I showed up when my orders told me to and had my coffee went to the gym and worked out for 3 hours came back hung out and went home. Did this for 6 months not a care or responsibility in the world. The shop NCOIC wanted me to help her write EPRs and supervise,I looked at her like she was insane, laughed and went and got coffee.

A GS-13 on a military base is like a fucking general, from what I have seen. Pretty sure that is why no one says anything.

There is a documentary about an Army librarian that worked an isolated gig and then was chosen for a science expirement.

I’ve been at my current job for 6 months and just met my supervisor last week.

I worked at a massive aluminum smelter, that had been built in the '50s. An equipment operator lost his load and it caved in a brick wall, with an unassuming, padlocked metal door. That contained an air conditioned room with a recliner, radio, end table, lamp and a rug that tied it all together.

That place was huge and had so many unused areas, that there was no telling what you might find if you went snooping.

Yes. A friend got left behind on a convoy as a strap hanger in Afghanistan fairly early in the war. He spent a few months there before another mission went to that village. It was pretty well isolated in the winter. He did some good work though and really helped out. It was some mom not talking to dad shit that no one noticed he didn’t get off the convoy at the new base and he was reported as accounted on the perstat. It’s a really long story but it worked out ok for him. Not for the convoy OIC though.

I was that guy

I worked for a company that was slowing down and lost its largest contract (which I was working on at the time).  A manager "saved" me from the layoff by giving me a bottom shelf pet project to see if we could get an old Navy jet flying and do something useful with it.  I had two technicians and we slowly started all the depot maintenance until one day we found some damage that meant the plane was beyond cost effective repair.  So my technicians got retasked.  I was left to carry on documenting what we would if the plane wasnt broken since we had the budget for engineering, and other projects were already over staffed by managers trying to keep as many people as possible.

Eventually my manager left the company without really saying anything to me.  I just noticed one day someone new was signing my time sheet.  I asked him if there was anything better to do and he said "not now, if your charge code works stay put and when I find something I'll let you know.".  I asked every few weeks until it was obvious he was annoyed by my asking.  So I stopped doing that.  I asked the other managers I knew and got the same answer.  Stand by until more work came in.

It was just me and this beat up old warbird in a hangar for about 9 months.  I eventually got too lazy to turn all the lights on, so the cleaning crew stopped cleaning the building thinking it wasnt in use.

I read some books... watched some movies... grilled lunch with the guys in the hangar next door... and came up with all sorts of stupid concepts for the airplane/documented them very well.  Like proposals to turn it into sled to set a land speed record at the salt flats .  I sometimes wonder if anyone ever dug through it and thought "what the fuck? We paid someone to do this?".  Its all tucked away on a server somewhere.

Eventually I just used most of my time for job search and landed a much better job at a company that had plenty to do.  I gave my two weeks notice as soon as I was fully vested in my retirement there.

It was fun for awhile, but it got depressing over time.

Something close to the above but with a bit of a prelude (first paragraph) leading to the nut of it, skip it if you find it a wall of words:

Late 70's early 80's. My Battalion was deployed to the Med. and as luck would have it, Carter decided to try his luck with Iran which ended poorly. Leading up to, during it and slightly after the MAU was diverted to the Indian Ocean to wait, and wait and wait... One evening during heavy seas we were sitting around playing spades on the deck. It was my turn to deal so I took my cigarette, put it under the tip of my boot to keep it from rolling away (flat bottom LST, ideal tub for rolling waves) while I dealt. I just lit it and wanted to finish it. The CMMA (i.e. dickhead) saw this and decided I flipped a butt on his precious shitboxes deck. I said I'm holding it there while I dealt, he would have none of that. He had this pet program he loved called Butt Patrol (I think the name was two-fold for this guy) where you walk around the deck with a red helmet with butt patrol printed in white and a matching miniature trash can. He decried that I was now it. Here's the Job: walk around the ship picking up litter and the days assignment ends when the bucket was full. You get off it only when you capture a fresh victim and rat him out (typical for a dickhead). The last part was a quandary for me for a few reasons such as fuck you dickhead plus ratting somebody out went against my single moral fiber. The old rock and a hard place.

It ended up being a sweet gig as we hung around the I.O. for a couple months or so. Most days I would lounge around the trash bags reading books or taking an MCI (sp?,) course. I must have completed 2 dozen of the things, a bunch of books and a great tan. Everybody else got to do fun things like clean weapons, inspections, calisthenics on a nice hot deck with exhaust fumes, etc. When I had enough, I would open a trash bag, fill my bucket and give it to dickhead. It finally ended when we were going to get a port of call in Kenya and I wanted off the boat. Ya, I said it, boat. B-O-A-T, boat. A sea-bee was walking by and flipped his butt right into one of the tie-downs. I figured a squid by any other name is still a squid so I said "Yo, here's your bucket. I pre-filled it for ya." He said fuck off and I told him to tell the MMA to fuck-off who in turn told me to fuck-off no sea-bee and all that and I said fuck-you which got my gunny involved who told me to take off for a minute while the MMA told me to fill the bucket to the top while I was floating around. Whew, fast paced there no?

Finally: I was still a bit heated with all the fuck this and that so I went up on the deck, grabbed a whole bag of trash, jammed that thing in the bucket and I mean jammed, good luck getting it out and brought it back down. The gunny said I could leave the helmet and bucket as I was done with it and the MAA opened the lid. He saw the trash was in a bag and asked where this came from. I told him "The same fucking place the rest of it did from your god damn trash pile up on the deck." He gave me a look that would kill and my gunny burst out laughing. I did like Kenya.

I had that job once.

Hired for a small software company as tech support. We had one product, for digital design engineers.

The boss was the owner and programmer, and an engineer. When I was hired we also had a sale guy, a female office type as well as the owner and myself.

Over time we lost the female and the sales guy, and the boss rarely came in. When I first started there I got a lot of calls for technical support, but that dropped off. So it got to be the point where I was just sitting there all day doing homework or daydreaming waiting for a call that might come in every few days. It was a pretty good college job.

Eventually the owner had to close shop and lay me off. But I was there quite a while with very little to do.

I dream of one day becoming he guy that flies so under the radar, he's flying under the sonar, and whose name is "who?"

Dubble tap

I was that guy for about a month.
The contract was ending & my work had dried up.
I basically browsed Amazon and read the Drudge report all day.
Some random new boss stumbled across me one day and asked what I did.
I just shrugged.
When they finally moved me to a new spot I spent another week or so doing nothing due to a parts shortage.
By the time they got their act together I had maybe 3 weeks left.
So I spent 2 weeks learning the new job, one week actually doing it, collected my PTO and severance checks and went home.

Yep. State facility I worked at hired a new IT guy about three years before I left. He was a busy little fellow the first six months. Was real good at his work, but even more skilled as a kiss ass. After that, the guy who hired him found a new job and left. IT boy started getting harder to find. The guy that left was not replaced.  The most senior staff left were there for managing their own gigs. Every once in a while someone would ask: "Anyone seen Joe....my keyboard is dead.?"  IT guy was good at politicking and made sure everyone had his cell number. The guy with the problem would call IT boy. He would spout some BS like: "Sorry, I left this morning to assist at Bio-med." Guess nobody but me and my pard knew that the guy hadn't been on site in over 3 weeks. We recalled not seeing him at all for a three month stretch once. Same MO, somebody would call his cell and he'd beeline in with some BS excuse as to why he was not present. That went on for over two years. Fucker was still skimming a state salary at least a year after I left.

I haven’t heard from my boss in about 5 weeks. My coworker and I do our jobs and get left alone. We average about 7 days a month of work, but we get paid 7 days a week 8 hour minimum plus 1.5 for everything over 40. Some weeks we don’t go to work. We worked 3 days last week, 1 day this week and we have 1 day scheduled for next week. The paychecks keep coming in.

I’m at the pool at the Marriott Marquis City Center in Doha typing this.

Did you really expect anything else OP?

sounds much like the BIA.