FTTY

I'm so glad my company a) has a "nobody wants teams" stance and even recommends against it to our clients, and b) doesn't give a fuck if I go idle for hours because they hired me to do a job and if it's getting done they're happy.

Micromanaging culture needs to die. Fire employees who don't do the job and be done with it.

It also eats up to 1,5gb of ram sitting idle as a chat program. So yeah it's not running unless I need it and then it gets to shut down again. Luckily we don't use it as our primary chat tool.

Set up a solo meeting with yourself. During meeting it doesn't change the status at all, so after you join that solo meeting in the morning set yourself to available and you will be available whole day.

I have Java on my machine. So I wrote a small program that moves the mouse one pixel every minute. Forever green.

My boss loves sending me messages saying "Are you working today?" within 3 minutes of being idle on teams at any point in the day.

Other times if i'm idle he'll call me just to give me some busy work or try and "catch me" not paying attention or something.

In the office I can be idle on teams for hours at a time and there's never, ever random spot checks for productivity... and we have no objectives, goals or project management (because he doesn't think any PM principles are effective.)

I'm so glad we use Matrix at work. Our IT department even tells us explicitly not to use Teams if we can avoid it.

I learned from my wife that you can start a meeting by yourself using the Meet Now button on the Teams calendar, and that will keep you flagged as Busy.

If you join a meeting with yourself only, you can manually set your status to available and it will never go to away.

I have teams open all day at my PC and on my work phone because that's how I get contacted to fix things. Annoyingly domain accounts no longer log us into teams so I have to reauthentice it 3 times a week. Worse still is every few months they'll reset the settings to default so that if I have teams open on my PC all notifications play there. My PC is always muted and I rely on my phone for notifications because I'm usually walking around the building and remoting back to the cube. So I'll go through days where I'm pissed off because I'm not getting notifications only to remember to go check the settings on the PC to find out yup its set to only play notifications there.

I run teams in a PWA on Linux which doesn't have permission to check if I'm using my computer or not so I'm always listed as away unless I'm interacting with Teams directly. I hate teams so much.

Using team status to know if you are working or not is both rudimentary and unreliable. There are a lot of times the status is just displayed wrong, besides, if stuff is getting done, then that is a sign you are working

Use a program called Caffeine. It presses F15 every 59 seconds. Nice thing is that F15 is a largely unused button, so it doesn't interfere in any way when you're actually doing something on the computer (classic mouse wigglers are very annoying in that regard)

One of the beautiful things about being able to run Linux at work and use Teams in a browser is that my status is decoupled from what I'm doing on my machine. Obviously if I'm in a meeting or chatting with somebody through Teams my status will reflect that.

I bet my most productive days have me away/idle for hours on end, lol.

Get a USB mouse jiggler. There are hundreds of them.

https://www.amazon.com/meatanty-Jiggler-Undetectable-Separate-Computer/dp/B09NVH8HVN

They are undetectable because they are just another USB Mouse.

These other solutions are so annoying. Yes let me spend the mental energy to wedge keys downs or setup fake meetings every single time I have to take a shit.

• physical mouse "jiggler" (mine is a turntable) that isn't connected to the work device
• physical key presser on a switch to press ESC every few seconds for when I'm pooping (this way the software shows both m n k activity)

I've even gone so far as to write a bash script that monitors the userdata folder that stores the JSON for activity and overwrite it with plausible but fake random activity data and screenshots, then name the process the same as the software so it's virtually undetectable- logs will show "Productivity Software Name" writing to its userdata directory at the same time the actual software is writing to it.

I'll go one step further and hope their both sides of their pillow are warm from fresh piss. What a totally asshole decision.

What I did was to set it to "Away" permanently

1. Open notepad
2. Place calculator on spacebar all it's activated
3. ...?
4. Profit

With all these "IT can see when you connect a USB device" comments, I must ask has anyone ever actually worked for an IT department that made you micromanage/snitch on people like that? It all sounds like a bunch of hypothetical scare mongering to me. Granted, I've never been company IT for a fortune 500, but I've been outsourced IT for dozens and dozens of other companies all across the spectrum, and the notion that we were monitoring USB devices connected to each workstation is laughable. We monitor for the presence of malicious files, files with names like passwords.txt, and suspicious logins to your account. That's pretty much it. People change mice all the time. I've used an arduino-based jiggler on my own work PC.

Furthermore, and this is the more important detail for myself, I've known many many different IT people working at every level and I don't think I've ever met a single one who gives half a shit if employees aren't being productive. Just don't break your computer please, and if you do, for the love of God don't try to fix it yourself. Personally, I've never seen any instance of any worker ever trying to circumvent arbitrary productivity metrics with easy workarounds because I'm not a fucking snitch. In IT, we also have bullshit "productivity" targets that are completely decoupled from actual productivity. We get that it's bullshit. If there's an IT department out there that's full of snitches trying to catch workers slacking, that sounds like a genuinely awful place to work.

I'm so glad that I don't know enough about teams to know what most of this means.

Unlike many others in this thread, I can't download any programs on my work laptop. I just don't have permissions.

So I found a much lower tech way of staying green. I go to the chat with yourself chat. Then I put a 3 pound weight on the backspace button. This keeps me green forever.

With my old work laptop, I was able to press backspace then wedge a set of tweezers in the key to hold it down.

Whatever works lol.

Why does it matter?

• a solo freelancer