Mundane Moments

I'm sure Jake is being paid to produce outcomes, like most of us. The fact that his manager judges his performance based on his activity rather than his output is her failure, not his.

He's not producing any outcome this afternoon, and certainly not the one he's been set.

How do you know what outcome he's being paid to produce? "Do this training" is not a product. Employees are not serfs. Blind obedience is not a reasonable expectation.

Staff training is often a good thing.

If you do not like the training or personally see it holds no value I don't think it should be beyond an adult employee to raise this, rather than some sulky work to rule routine.

Now go back to the original post. The training makes no sense and is tied to extra work that Jake has no interest in doing for the compensation offered. The fact that she hasn't asked him if he is willing to exchange the additional labour for additional compensation is entirely her failing, not his. He is willing to continue fulfilling the terms of his contract, her expectation is that he will go above and beyond that simply because she needs him to.

Are we sure of this, because he's started the training and done the math on the salary?

Damn right. I’ve got people exactly like that in my team and they are great.. yet I am constantly bombarded ‘from above’ with demands to engage them in training and development and a bunch of other shit that they have no interest in. It makes everyone’s life worse.. but the problem with companies being run by career motherfuckers is that they think everyone else should be a career motherfucker too.

If you, as a bossman, would react positively to someone raising this and happily let them get on with doing the job they were doing before, then congratulations. That is officially ‘good bossing’ and is rarer than you may think. Which is why most people opt against having adult conversations with their bosses.

(Just to be clear.. staff training is definitely often good and important and necessary for people to do their exisiting jobs or other things that the employer genuinely needs doing. But training for the sake of training, or to try and develop people into things they don’t want to be, is bollocks)

Yes, and I have a bit of experience in this as manufacturing isn't always a magnet for high flying Gordon Gekko types.

From a horrible nasty capitalists PoV these people are perfect as long as they:

accept their self imposed glass celling limits their earning potential
don't mind taking instruction from less qualified line management who are willing to take on the stresses they are not
producing an agreed amount of work to an acceptable standard
aren't demotivating others, ie not dossing about wiggling the mouse every 60 seconds all afternoon moaning about their lot whilst everyone around them is working

If they satisfy the above they are ideal for manufacturing, as essentially it's as close to mechanising something you can't mechanise.

I work from home, cheerful when I chat to people. I get the work done that is asked of me. In fact, I get it done in about half the time I'm given to do it, I'm choosing to work below my ability level for less money because I've just spent 19 years stressed out in teaching.

I actually ended up working until 6:30pm yesterday because, within the task I was being trained to do, I found a whole load of mess that was a part of my job. As someone who takes the initiative, I got it done, instead of waiting for someone to need it to be done quickly which seems to be the way the office works. Finished off by replying to a query from a client who I've developed a good relationship with.

But I'm not interested in progressing. I'm not interested in being paid more to have to work to tight deadlines and increase my stress levels and I can see working from home getting tedious so an 18 month contract doing what I'm doing is great.

My boss is actually quite aware that I'm not biting at the bit to climb the ladder. Her superiors however, have an issue with a backlog of work that needs to be done and nobody with the time/ability to do it. They've identified me as someone who can but I'm not interested, and it doesn't help that the money on offer is not enough.

The moving the mouse every minute isn't quite true. I have a mouse jiggler I downloaded from GitHub.

Beautiful dénouement

Careful, Séan won't be able to control himself.

Maybe he can download a Sean jiggler from Github.

URME etc etc (except newspapers instead of teaching and a permanent rather than fixed-term contract).