I was pondering what might happen if, like Peter from Office Space, I simply decided to not go to work anymore. I’m not going to quit. I’m just not going to go anymore.
Theoretically, I could do this for weeks or months. As a consultant, we tend to travel or work from home a lot and I don’t have a particular boss keeping tabs on me. As long as I respond to my Blackberry and fill out my timesheet online, I could theoretically never go to work again until someone notices that I haven’t billed any hours to any clients.
Taking it a step further, I wonder what repercussions, if any, there would be if I started a totally new job and just never quit the old one.
“If you don’t like your job, you don’t go on strike! You go in every single day, and do it really half-assed. That’s the American Way!” (-Homer Simpson)
I kind of did this for my current job. I hate it, I hate the company and think they’re extremely incompetent and unprofessional, and I don’t want to work in this field anymore.
It’s an hourly position where I need to call in to schedule shifts. So I’ve simply stopped calling in and scheduling to work. Every now and then, they call and ask if I want to work a particular shift, but so far they’ve been extremely inconvenient (calling at 6:17am to see if I can be 30 miles away at 7am) or just plain stupid, so I’ve ignored the phone calls.
I’m not getting paid, but I technically still work for them.
I would love to do this. Just not go. Not forever, only for a day or two. or maybe a whole week. A year at the most. Long enough to bored with Real life again, and allow the memory of massive suckitude to fade.
Unfortunately, in my case, my boss is not a moron, and my physical presence is an actual on-site necessity. I suspect someone would notice, and consider it quitting by abandonment. Dammit.
I could probably get away with a trick like that, simply because I split my time between two locations at opposite ends of the city. Office politics are such that the two locations rarely speak as a result of several factors (distance, superiority complexes, finger-pointing… y’know, the usual), so theoretically each location would simply assume that I’m working at the other one, but wouldn’t pick up the phone to check with someone.
Combine that with my desk line and emails both forwarding to my Blackberry and I could pretend I’m still there quite effectively until I give myself away by missing too many meetings.
Mind you, I’d never do it because I’d essentially totally screw myself out of any future employment in my field. The world of telecom can get rather incestuous, unfortunately, and you don’t want to earn a reputation as that person.
My sister once worked a job at a place that was totally disorganized and never had anything for her to work on. So after a while, she’d go look for work, and if she didn’t have any, she’d do outside contract work at her desk. She made more doing that than working her “real” job.
At least one company I’ve worked for stated in the contract that not showing up for three days without some sort of excuse was considered the equivalent to a formal resignation.
The longest I could probably go is six weeks. I could call all my clients and delay them past the month, and in my company nobody would notice right away if I stopped billing time. But at month’s end, they would notice when the schedule didn’t match billables. I could then submit phony billable reports, and it’d take a week for those to get out and customers to respond angrily. Then they’d take at least a week trying to get in touch with me before they fired me officially.
I know - not through a FOAF, but I have direct, detailed knowledge of - a person who worked as an enforcement officer for the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario who got away with this for TWO YEARS. She’d fill out site visit reports and such and never actually visited any sites. It would take my company six weeks (and that’s if I planned it) but it took the government two years to discover an essentially identical situation. That tells me a lot about how the government spends my money.
A friend (of a sort) basically did this with a post office job. Just stopped showing up.
He called in the first day, missed the second day, called in sick again on the third day.
When he tried to saunter into work a month later, they told him he would need a note from his doctor. He aquired one, was put back on the schedule, and didn’t show up again.
They called him a few months later, asking him if he intended to work again any time soon.
I was working retail. It was just after I graduated, and had worked at this sucky-ass store, with douchebag managers, for almost 2 years. My friend suggested we should go up and rent a cabin for a few weeks up-north during the summer. I didn’t really plan on quitting, but I didn’t even bother to tell management that I was planning on taking some time off (which even a few days was very frowned upon). So, I just didn’t show up anymore. Didn’t bother going back either.
I scheduled vacation last year for the week at the end of July-beginning of August. Every year for 13 I scheduled at least a week in August for vacation, sometimes 3, for Worldcon and sightseeing.
I got back from St. Louis at the end of that week and had a relapse of chronic coughing from earlier in the year. The first time it took me 3 months to recover enough to go back to work. When I called in, I was told I was only signed up for vacation for Monday and Friday of the week before, I didn’t call in for 3 days in a row, so I had quit. They didn’t actually decide this until it was clear I was going to be off work again for a couple of months. And they didn’t explain why my boss had reassigned the guy training me to a different job the entire week I was gone the Thursday before I left.
Since Ohio is an at will state, pretty much my only recourse is to find another job.
