My coworker sits adjacent to me, so I can see her computer screen from where I’m sitting. She spends nearly the entire day working on her novel. She types it into the company e-mail and then sends it to her home e-mail address. I have to say it’s a pretty brilliant plan. Whenever my boss walks by it just looks like she’s replying to something company related. They think she is absolutely great and the best employee ever because she rarely talks and never causes drama. The best was when they changed the whole technique of submitting OT. A whole bunch of us messed it up myself included. My supervisor singled my coworker out and patted her on the head in front of everyone stating, “She’s the only one who did it right.” I felt like retorting, “well that’s interesting, being that she’s the only one who didn’t do OT.” She belongs to a car pool and they come in fifteen minutes early each day. She works on her novel during that extra time and charges the company for 15 minutes of OT daily, isn’t that grand? She’s been getting away with it for years because she flies right under their radar. She picks through the accounts (I’ve seen her doing it) and pulls out all the easy ones that can be done in a few minutes leaving all the rest to everybody else. This way it look like she’s actually doing work because she has numbers. In truth she manages to knock these accounts off in about an hour and then works on her novel the other seven. And right now a few people are out in the office and we’re swamped but she could care less. Management think she’s this awesome hardworking employee because she’s got a nonexistent error rate as she does no work!!! They have yet to figure this out. Meanwhile the whole office knows but no one wants to be the one to tell on her because we’re all afraid of being blown off. My friend has already complained about her picking through the accounts to take the easy ones multiple times in the past only to be told, “well some people don’t work as fast and efficiently as you do.” Ha!
