More specifically, in the course of your career, have you or someone you've known been essentially left in a corner somewhere at your company and forgotten about for a long time?  Still getting paid mind you, but essentially left to do stuff on their own without any supervisor checking in on them or anything.  How long did it last?  What was the nature of the work?

I thought about this after reading a news article a month or two ago about a guy who worked for some local government office in Spain who had been on the payroll for like 20 years and just didn't even come into work anymore.

Yes. They fucked with his stapler.

First two posts nailed it

Yep, a friend of mine was largely left to his own devices as an in-house software guy at a major airline. I think it went on for about four months until they reorganized him into a new team.

Happened to me once.

Didn’t see another human for weeks.

Was great.

I desperately try to be that guy. Except I actually show up to work, on time, work, and leave on time. I am invisible by way of never needing to be addressed to begin with.

I am an ER nurse for the VA. Literally thousands of employees at the hospital that exist only to have meetings with each other. Oh, and of course to do their most to obstruct vets from getting care.  If the OP is looking for a job where he is not required to work or produce, look no farther than the VA.

That sounds.. Fantastic.

You are always invisible, right until you screw something up and then everyone knows your name.

Worked at one of the "Big 3" as an IT contractor. Huge design center building. Had offices in the basement, usually not the "first string" politically connected employees.

One dungeon-like section (great big room, always dark and gloomy, hundred or so desks) had offices along one wall. Fairly good sized offices but you rarely saw people in them. The very back corner office was a guy whose desk nameplate said he worked on the design team for a car they hadn't made in a couple of years. Office was cluttered and messy. The guy was there every so often. Old dude, short sleeve dress shirt type. No computer on his desk (you used to see this occasionally but he was the last one I saw, all of those old technophobes either got canned or retired).

I'm positive he just kind of fell out of the org chart. Out of the way office, maybe was a lateral report to someone, looked like they forgot about him. Maybe he had a couple of years until his pension and someone was looking out for him. Never saw him do any work ever.

Your VA sucks.

You should come up here where I'd say 95+% of the patients I see in cardiology love this hospital.

This VA hospital.

Exactly.

That was a great job. Shame they got bought out.

Worked alongside my sister, but I was down some awkward hallway in a cluster of offices, by myself. Like way off the beaten path for everyone. Usually the only person I would see, if I saw anyone was her, and maybe the secretary depending on what times I came in and out.

I never had to go to any meetings. Could show up roughly whenever I wanted to and leave whenever I wanted to. Lunches were usually 1.5 or longer. We always got out early on Fridays. Holidays were crazy with time off.

My boss would come in once a month to tell me what a great job I was doing(very awesome sincere guy). He still hits me up from time to time.

It got boring pretty fast though. I would finish all my work way too fast, and keeping yourself entertained day after day is a chore. It’s actually when I racked up most of my arfcom posts.

Highlight of it though was when Don Jr walked by my office.

My parents were friends with a guy who worked at a company in the early 80s that got bought by a Japanese company.

At that time, when a Japanese company wanted you gone they didn't fire you, but instead gave you a "window seat" - they took away all your duties and responsibilities, leaving you staring out a window all day. In Japanese culture, workers given a window seat would quickly resign out of shame.

Apparently that message didn't translate well for American workers.  He stayed there for almost 2 years, writing children's books all day until he got bored and left.

Boy, would they be fucking with the wrong guy if they did that to me.

I'd have a nurse wheeling me in there in a wheelchair with an IV at 90 years old.

Basically my job. I get to work, everyone leaves (except the athletes), I go about doing my work orders and/or whatever the head custodian tells me (I see him for 2 seconds while we shift change) plus all the other shit I already know needs to be done. General building maintenance.

My boss rarely ever comes to check up on me; I see him maybe 4 times a year. Sometimes I get radio calls from the athletic department or the admins. Usually not after 6 unless we have an event in the building. So long as my work gets done (and it most certainly does) nobody bothers me.  Life is good!

Not forgotten about, but just up and left. He was a Loss Prevention manager at a nearby store. He moved from Washington to Georgia, but didnt tell anyone. He called in to the weekly conference calls every week. It took 6 months before anyone realized he hadnt actually been to the store, nor did any work, during that time. They fired him.

We had a Navy guy on the Saipan that was supposed to be guarding our MREs stored in the ship's hull, he started living down there and just eating all the MRE candy. He literally just sat down there and ate for a few months, he probably would have made for the entire cruise if Kosovo didn't happen.

I started my career and spent a little over 8 years at an FFRDC, and while most were assigned to projects it wasn't a big deal to be on overhead. I'd wager about 10% of the employees were just collecting a paycheck, and many of them were literally in WWII era building corners. They were happy to be forgotten about.

I bet the internet screwed that strategy up real good for the Japanese.

Its all fine till you come out of the shadows to find your world has passed you by.

While doing lab work, I do not talk to coworkers or others for weeks at a time.

I am that guy

Brb, starting a company to sell to the Japanese.

Military is full of them.

We had a guy at my unit get FAPed (Fleet assistance program) out to some ammo dump for like 8 months.  I don't remember the details but they never used him and he never came back until the 8 months was over.

Had another guy go on convalescent leave after screwing his back up majorly.  He spent like 10 months on "bed rest".  Sat on his couch and played xbox for almost a year.

Career planner loved his job.  Sat in a building away from BN and did nothing.

The GySgt who was in charge of piss tests was never there, like never ever.

Or Social Security and a long list of other tax wasted positions.

Back in the 70’s we had a two guys who manually produced accounting reports that were sent up to the general manager of the unit.  Only, that GM had retired four years previously.  The new GM didn’t read those reports and assumed the reports were used by others.  They kept cranking out paper and drawing a check.  Those reports were later automated into the computer system and the same guys retyped and continued to distribute them.  Eventually, the auditors caught on and they were moved to other managers.

A fellow I worked with had worked on the Aswan Dam project and workers were bussed to and from the job site on company busses.
One individual was never listed on the job roster but was on the payroll roster.He NEVER was allowed to board a bus but ALWAYS got paid......
for 2 years......

I found an entire office that was forgotten about.

Some years ago I was working for a huge, multi-national oilfield company. I was the regional environmental guy but pretty much just took care of all kinds of shit.  I had just done several years as a military contractor but have a background in environmental science.  Pretty soon I was doing all kinda shit... theft? I'll run an investigation.  Regulatory shit, I'll take care of it.  People needed firing? I'll go do it.  Whatever...

So I'm looking at some of our facility information and ask someone about a facility way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere around Amarillo.  Several people told me it had been closed and sold off years ago.  Nope... we still own it and everything appears active. There are permits and everything.

Fuck it... I'll drive up there and check it out.

Roll up about lunch time and there's an old pickup parked under an awning.  Ok... utilities are on.  It's all locked up, so I break in.

It's weird... it looks like this office has been frozen in time for 20 years.  All the HR posters and shit on the wall are out of date, everything's dated... a couple of computers are old as fuck.  But there's a stack of paperwork on a desk and an ashtray with a couple of stubbed out cigarette butts in it. I mean, people were working. In the utility bay/garage there are tracks where a truck drove in and parked.

About the time I was thinking, "This is really fucking weird", there's an older guy standing in the front doorway... "Umm... Can I help you? Are you from Corporate?"

Long story short, there are three guys that work there... who have worked at this office for between 15-20 years.  Two field guys and a supervisor who spent about half his time in the field. They had some small time Mom-and-Pop clients that kept them busy, did their work, got regular deliveries of chemicals and shit, and hadn't seen anyone from corporate for NINE FUCKING YEARS.  The supervisor didn't even know who he was supposed to report to.  They just did their work, turned in their paperwork, did their time sheets and didn't make waves.

Couple of years back, they needed a new utility truck and put in a requisition... One day a transporter showed up to drop off a new one and pick up the old one.  They kept getting paid and kept getting regular raises and bonuses every year.

Alright... nothing else to do here, I guess.  I just left.  I told my bosses, "Nope... That office is still active" and never went into detail.  Only response I got was, "Huh... No shit?" and that was the end of it.

For all I know, those dudes are still there.

We used to call them on the “ROAD Program” (Retired On Active Duty)

My shit works, and keeps working. If it breaks I take responsibility and make it work again.
Easy to avoid talking to my boss for months

I got a taste of that in college working in a lab supervisor's assistant position. Other than a once a year state inventory of equipment we basically sat around and waited for stuff to break or need troubleshooting.

My cousin’s husband is a mechanical engineer.  He worked for a foreign company that had a presence in the USA in order to bid on .gov contracts.  He searched the Internet for 2 years before quitting.  He also would go to long lunches and other similar things.

When I worked at Johnson Space Center there was a building I had some duties in where we had a lot of thermal-vacuum test chambers.  Because the facility had liquid nitrogen lines running through it, the engineers who ran the chambers were really responsible for the whole building too.

But every building at JSC also had a Facility Manager, or some similar title.  They were supposed to do those jobs that the engineers were doing in this one particular building.  In an office building, the Facility Manager would make sure that construction work was roped off correctly, or coordinate power outages or whatever.  They would be some random person who had a full time job, sat in the building, but also did the Facility Manager job when it was required.

So since the engineers running the test chambers did that work in this particular building, the official Facility Manager for that building had no Facility Manager duties.  And through some series of events I never got the history on, she had no other duties, no regular job.  Somehow she had worked herself into being the Facility Manager for a building with nothing for a Facility Manager to manage.  Since she was a civil servant we could look up her salary.  Back in the late 2000s she was making $112,000/year to sit in her office doing nothing all day.  The guys who had worked there longer than I had said that when her kids were young she had brought them to work everyday to take care of them until they were five and started school.

Amen.

Government employee?  Probably thousands of them

I know a GS13 at Ft Hood that goes to his office everyday, closes the door and naps until time to go home.

Everybody knows it and nobody does anything. It's ridiculous.

FPNI phenomenon.

There was a guy, one of our technicians, at Motorola back in the mid 80's who looking back I guess you would call a sovereign citizen type.

He ridiculed all of us for paying federal taxes. He had some scheme with his W-2 or something where he hadn't paid the IRS anything for 20 years or more.

He tried explaining it a few times but it all sounded like tax evasion felonies to me. But as far as I know nothing ever happened to him regarding that shit.

Then do something about it.
1-877-499-7295

Awesome

It's better to send people to the basement than to fire them in some cases.
I've seen it done several times, they were only allowed out for mandatory training sessions, otherwise their job was to review technical journals cover-to-cover and write summaries of the articles to be circulated among the staff, which no one actually read.

Kharn

Did they have Rip Van Winkle beards and tattered uniforms?

Yeah, every national level GC has one. He's usually an old guy with a goofy name and all he does is sit in a job shack and check submittals.

Ha, yeh my old boss at the DOE many moons ago.  He got displaced in order to accommodate a RIF in our HQ office.  New boss was too much of a pussy to put him to work.  So old boss did nothing for a while.  Then he started up a side business of software development while collecting his DOE check.  He'd come to work in flip flops, shorts, and Hawaiian shirts and work on his new gig.  Then he got a big contract on his side business.  He had me and another guy helping with code.  He paid me $2k or something under the table.  Then he took an early out.  And that party was over.

I knew an in-house janitor (not a contractor) guy that just went about his cleaning duties for years and years just totally left alone..if he wanted to be involved he would but pretty much left completely alone.