"Paging Mr. Jayson Blair": how to use high-tech to pretend you're at work
I'm coming to this story two weeks late, but for those of you who haven't seen it, the Wall St. Journal ran a hilarious story describing the ways that employees use technology to pretend they're at work, when they're not. For example:
David Wiskus gives new meaning to the term "working lunch." The Denver tech-support worker installed a program on his Handspring Visor hand-held that allowed him to manipulate the screen on his office computer from a booth at a local diner.
As he lingered for hours over burgers and fries, he could actually open windows and move documents around on his screen via the hand-held -- creating the impression to anyone who walked by that the diligent Mr. Wiskus had just stepped away from his desk.
Okay, that's clearly pretty insane, and requires more high-tech kung fu than the average worker possesses. But some of the other tricks are easier, such as using GoToMyPC.com to remotely log onto your computer, open up documents, and send things to the printer ... so you can look as if you've just stepped away from your desk. Another fun trick: If you use a Blackberry pager, you hack it to remove the line it normally adds at the end of each email -- "Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld" -- so that your boss will think you wrote the message at your desk. They also discuss the lovely scam of setting email timers to auto-sent at a much later time, so you can make it look like you were firing off memos at 2 am.
I actually do stuff like this all the time, but with a slightly different goal. Since I'm a freelance writer, I work pretty much everywhere, 24/7: On the subway, at the cafe, walking down the street, in the middle of an evening out with friends. (Sigh.) But it's usually too much hassle to explain to my interview subjects that "oh, sorry, yeah, you've just caught me boarding a plane" or "uh, I'm currently shopping for old Atari 2600 cartridges in the East Village." So I use my mobile phone and my Danger Hiptop to create the illusion that I'm pretty much always seated behind a big metal 40s-style desk, with, like, a fedora with a "press" card on my head.
Now you know.
(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at June 12, 2003 06:00 PM
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Thanks for the useful tips for avoiding work! These rank right up there with the old George Costanza trick of always carrying file folders as you rush around the office, so it always looks like you have someplace important to go, even if it's just the can, or to hit on the secretary.
I remember seeing a program, once, that mimicked a software setup routine. You started it, entered the amount of time you wanted the program to run for, then sat back and relaxed, comfortable in the knowledge that, should anyone ask what you were doing, you could point to the monitor and say, "Just installing this utility. Looks like it's going to take awhile."
