White Lies Help Stressed Computer Users

An anonymous reader writes "Simple tricks allow one to appear to be hard at work in the office while actually forwarding calls, e-mails and instant messages to your mobile phone. One can backdate e-mails through rolling back a computer's built-in clock or use background phone noises to concoct convincing excuses not to go to work."

Comments

people have been lazy long before tech

[ibanez16]

People have always been finding ways to cheat work. Whether its longer breaks, sleeping in the bathroom, yeah i know people who have done it, or god knows what else. My favorite though is the george costanza's method, building a bed under your desk to take naps in.

God i've thought about it myself a few times......

setting back clock does nothing

[germanStefan]

While setting back you clock may fool some people, it wont fool anyone who knows about the "header" of an e-mail. A quick peek there and you find all the timestamps of each email server that passed the email along. If there is a "huge" gap inbetween when it was send form "localhost" and the first mailserver...something is up.

Also this doesn't work if one uses webmail where one would have to reset the server's time.

NOT that I don't resolve to such trickery once in a while. Most of our boses won't read the header of a message, and only the true geek has his e-mail viewer set to e-mail source instead of the nice outlook (evolution for me) display. If your cubicle is in a public place, virtual desktops comes in handy. gaim open on desktop 1, quickly move to desktop2 with source code open when you hear footsteps... or for the windows fans, alt tab to a full screen program where you have "actual work" open...

I would be interested in what other slashdotters do, I'm sure we have some pretty original ideas.

I waste my employer's money the old fashioned way

[museumpeace]

I used to rename all the executables for my playthings to the application names for editing, compiling, archiving and so on. [Its good to have privs.] If they sniffed my processes, I look like I'm bustin my hump for 'em

Re:Marx predicted this

[Oligonicella]

Did Marx predict the plethora of corruption and dictatorial suppression that is the very hallmark of communism? Or perhaps the almost complete and utter collapse of the various contries economys?