I was on a big UK Govt contract. I was part of a team of subcontractors. The clients team did not believe they needed us, and assigned 12 people 2 desks, with one PC. They would not give us access to the systems or documentation. This went on for three months. Later on in the contract, our primary client and a second, smaller dept merged. Two of us got sent to the second dept site to instruct their team on our processes/standards and validate their work output.
The team at my new site did not want us there, and didn’t believe that we had anything to tell them. So two of us twiddled our thumbs and browsed the internet (via an unfiltered proxy we should not have been able to use) for six months. And everyone knew. I was getting payed and getting expenses, but I really hated the job.
Si
My first job out of college I worked for a software testing company. One time, I spent three weeks on a proof of concept contract for our software. I was finishing out the contract for another employee who quit.
One of the first things I’m told when I get there is that I am an adviser only. I am not supposed to do any of the work, that’s for the different groups to do as part of the evaluation. I find out that of the 3 groups I will be working with, one of them can’t use our product for what they’re doing, the head of the second group is on vacation in another country, and the third group is run by someone who either can’t understand it or doesn’t want to use it. No one asked me anything.
So for three weeks I sat on my highly paid contractor ass and goofed off on the internet, read books, took epic lunches, etc. And it sucked. I felt like at any moment some manager would storm into my cube demanding to know why I was wasting their money. It always felt like I was doing something wrong.