I had a job for over decade where I worked very hard to work very little.

TLDR: I would do 2 hours of very light work and get paid for 8.

I have only ever told 1 person this story because people tend to get angry if you don’t work “hard enough,” even if they didn’t work with you and it has literal zero to do with them. I’m going to keep this as vague as possible. I worked for a healthcare company that had a few locations and included some child care. I was the only employee in my position, which made this easier. My position involved picking up people in the morning and dropping them off in the evening also various midday shuttling. The vehicle I drove was owned by a separate company and we would basically rent it daily to provide our services. That company also paid a stipend to my company because I was technically working for them but also only employed by my company. I was told I would get the stipend as an hourly wage which would result in a raise, that wasn’t the case. The stipend was double my salary since I was way underpaid for my position and they just kept it instead. So basically my company got me for free all day and also profited. I decided that I would make my job what I could and do as little as possible.

In the morning I would pick up the vehicle at 7a, pick up/drop off would be done before 8a and usually before 730, my first shuttle would happen until 930. I would basically “hide” for that time, I would go out to breakfast, take a nap, read, or play on my phone. The 930 shuttle was 10 minutes total and return was 1030. So I’d do the same thing for that hour. My next shuttle was at 1130, so I’d kill that hour as well. When that was done I would take “lunch,” it was supposed to be 30 min but I’d usually take an hour because I deserved it. Sometimes in my lunch hour I would do some rideshare stuff in my vehicle and then go back to work. I would be “back” at 1245 and my drop offs were at 2 so I would waste that hour as well. I would usually finish drop offs before 230 and rarely did it take that long. The transportation company didn’t log my time in and out, they just paid my company for 7-330 no matter what happened. I would then go back to drop off the vehicle around 230/245 and just go home. For a few years I would do homework during much of the downtime to finch my college degree, so there is that.

I couldn’t disappear the entire day, I would walk through the facility during the day to say hi to my boss and talk with coworkers. There were plenty things I could’ve absolutely been doing and technically should’ve been doing but it was not noticeable at all. Basically I could’ve made some coworkers jobs slightly easier for a few minutes but fairly irrelevant. It would be stuff like, the employee has to answer the phone and they get 10 phone calls an hour, which was simple and they had more than enough time to do that but I could’ve taken 1 of the calls instead. Basically irrelevant but I could’ve. Much of the time I would do this busy work just because it was something to do. At one point there was a hard-nosed Karen that took over a department I wasn’t part of. The kind of person that’s worried about everyone else all the time and can’t live without spending her time on hassling other people. She started asking people what I do all day and even went to my boss. My boss flat out told her that I have shit to do all day that keeps me busy and it was none of her business. The irony of my boss defending me is fantastic.

The best part of my job was in the summer, some days I would have outings. I would drop them off somewhere at 930 and bring them back around 130-230. I was not required to ever stay on the outing. I could choose to stay and if they needed extra help, I would always stay. Either way, this was never reported to anyone so I could basically take a 4-5 hour break everyday in the summer if I wanted.

All of this required a lot of hard work to make sure I wasn’t caught. I had to pay attention to what info was passed between departments and companies, aware of where all the recording devices were so I wouldn’t be seen stagnant for a long period of time. I had to make sure to present just enough but also make it look like I was really busy at those times as to not raise questions. also could basically never call-in because another employee would fill in and they would finish my work lightning fast and be back to their own work, lots of questions get asked when that happens. I learned to schedule vacation around holidays that had no midday shuttling or I would purposely have summer days with no outings so no fill-in was needed.