h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The prisoner bit is a well known quote. I made up the second part, but that is my belief. Most of us of working age who are not self or un-employed give up huge chunks of our one and only life to work for others. Most are also not fairly renumerated for this huge sacrifice. Therefore i see it as good and right to exploit any little loopholes or hard to audit bits of my job to take some company time for myself. I've just been enjoying a little music back home as my house is conveniently on the way back to my office after a morning doing a not entirely essential site visit. Oh well.. Back to work soon.. Anybody have any issues with this or think I'm wrong to do this?

Nope.

I'm logged on here from work every day ain't I?

I'll just add that over the last few decades, worker productivity has risen greatly along with corporate profits, yet wages have stagnated.

As some of my former coworkers were fond of saying, "Piqueño dinero? Piqueño trabajo!"

"Most are also not fairly renumerated for this huge sacrifice. Therefore i see it as good and right to exploit any little loopholes or hard to audit bits of my job to take some company time for myself." [Winnoch 2]

i would tweak "renumerated" (renumbered?) and turn it into "remunerated". You're welcome! And, like the others in this thread, I too have spent work time logged in to H2G2.

There's a bit of a logical gray area to be traversed, though. I have family members who gasp when they hear much my pension plan is paying out to me. I benefit from being able to point out, truthfully, that by any objective measure I was woefully underpaid for about 30 years.* If pension money is deferred income, then one could argue that the scales of justice may well swing around in your favor years from now. Or, if you are unlucky enough not to live long enough to collect your retirement pay, it won't happen, though you will not be alive to curse the fates.

My father worked for about 30 years, retired at the age of 62, and is currently 98. He therefore got retirement pay over a longer period than he paid into Social Security. However, he was part of the effort to defeat the Nazis in the early 1940s, so any rewards he is now getting are richly deserved! --


*Five or six years before I retired, a systemwide recalibration of our salaries pushed my salary much higher, and my retirement pay was based on the three highest years. This makes me even happier!

I've never worked a job that offered a pension. I was never even offered an IRA or health insurance until the job I got at 30. I'm in a "right to work" state where unions have been demonized and workers believe in trickle down economics. (I don't know whether to or .)

An IRA is between you and whatever financial institution you choose for the custodian. Your employer is not in the loop. If you wanted to open an IRA after 1982, you could have done so even if your employer didn't offer any deferred-compensation plans. Some employers offer 401K plans, or 403b plans, or 457 plans. Those have some similarities with IRA's, but you are advised to shift their assets into actual IRA's before the year in which you turn 70.5.

I'm sorry that your state has been so remiss.

Social Security is more beneficial for the longest-lived workers than it is for the shortest-lived.

I only started paying into a pension in my early 30's, so it'll never amount to much unless I work well into my 90's . I laught at the annual statement I get from one ex-employer. It's a standard document personalised with my own figures, but the 'can i afford to retire on this?' and 'what your monthly payout could be', is always amusing to me as it's usually in the £3-4 per month region .

Don't spend it all in one shop, as the old saying goes

Admitedly There are 2 or 3 other employer pensions but I've lost track of those and they are likely in a similar value bracket due to the short time I spent in their employ. So, so far I'm in for a fortune of at least a tenner per month . Can I afford to retire on this? Erm, no.

I've had very few jobs in my life... starting from the very young, dog-walking, always gave the dog a good run-round, but always involved a trip to the pub, half way round the so sort of skiviging...
The next job was wildly aweful pay (but free coffee, and you could smoke in the office back then), but; the pay was dependant on 'performance, so you sort of had to work, to an extent, to get any real cash (or more cash in pay compaired to how many fags you smoked, whilst being boared to death at a phone )
Subsequently, the only proper job, was far too much pay for far too little work; which didn't take me the time they seemed to think it would, but I counteracted that by working longer hours, when they were stumped/needed it, and turning round documents/projects over bank holiday weekends, etc... Still think they paid me too much/didn't make me do enough.

Now I get paid nothing, and work twice the hours they require, and rarely do anything cept what we're ment to do... but its a voluntary position, so I guess that helps with want to do it >

The weirdly stupid one, was the bits inbetween some of that, where, self employed, contract, the 'going rate' per day, was insainely high, and I felt embarrassed to charge so much, fo rsomething that took no effort, and very little time, but which required a bit of knowledge, and, oddly, if you advertised at less than the 'going rate' no one gave you work a pity, as I kinda enjoyed that

Yes, I meant 401(K) rather than IRA which is, indeed, Independent.

But honestly, none of the jobs I had before that paid me enough to save any money at all anyway.


OH, and for everyone, I suggest reading a book called _The Index Card_ by Helaine Olen and Harold Pollack. It's the best thing you can read about personal finance.

"There are 2 or 3 other employer pensions but I've lost track of those and they are likely in a similar value bracket due to the short time I spent in their employ" [Winnoch2]

Might it be possible for you to ask them to transfer those amounts into whatever job account has the most in it? Sometimes this can be done. What I don't know is whether it would work for you.

"none of the jobs I had before that paid me enough to save any money at all anyway" [Baron Grim]

That's true for a lot of young people. I mowed lawns and shoveled snow for the town library from the time I was twelve, but there was never anything withheld for retirement. In college, I spent summers working on assembly lines or in a greenhouse, again with not much to show for it. In grad school, I worked part-time intern positions in a couple of college libraries. The most Social Security credit I accumulated from those years was three quarters of work credit.

Thanks for reminding us of the book about indexing. Buying index funds works best for people with a long investment horizon (more than ten years, and preferably much longer). You could conceivably do just as well with canny real estate moves or owning your own business. But real estate is extremely illiquid, and small businesses are not guaranteed to survive. Owning the whole stock market, on the other hand, solves the problem of insufficient diversification. And, someone who know what he/she is doing will handle the details of running it.

Best of luck, in any event.

They say that if you love what you're doing, you'll never work a day of your life. But if you can't love your job, is there something on the side that you like doing?

Just my . . .

If a person accepts a work position, perhaps signs an agreement or contract, that person is aware of the duties, remuneration and any applicable benefits. It was accepted by choice. To then intentionally waste time or any other sort of "taking from the business" is unethical. Perhaps if caught out, easy grounds for dismissal and possible penalties.

It is not up to the employer to make the employee happy or even feel needed. If the employee feels the whole situation is beneath them, unrewarding in any way - it is up to the employee to take leave of the place for something more to their taste or benefit.

Something that does amuse me is some youth who feel that having put perhaps 12 years of their life into education - say age 6 to 18 - they should automatically begin their first employment for atleast the wage that Dad gets. (After his 20 or more years of working) Anything less is beneath them.

Again, over the last several decades worker productivity, and with it, corporate profits have risen sharply while workers wages have stagnated at best. We're dealing with robber barons again.

Just look at Jeff Bezos. He is the richest man on earth, yet his company pays ZERO federal taxes and his workers are notoriously overworked and undercompensated (turnover rates for his warehouse workers is at under 1 year average) yet our cities and states are shoveling tax payer money at him in tax abatements and incentives.

The balance between the Owners and workers is extremely one sided.

I did expect this point of view to turn up RevNick. I'm not saying it's not a perfectly valid point of view, just that it's not as black and white as that.


Firstly few positions turn out quite as expected. Mission-creep sets in early and jobs evolve over time, an employees assessment of how well paid they are for the given role changes. I thought the pay was quite reasonable for my job when I started. Now that the full scope of the roles and responsibilities are clear to me, i believe otherwise. But that's the banding I'm on with no scope for increases beyond derisory incremental annual increases amounting to a few extra £per month.

Secondly even if I did believe I was being well paid, I'd still take opportunities to 'skive' as they arise. It's ultimately *my* life and time and no contract on earth can change that.

I never extract the Michael or leave important work undone. Despite the impression my posts may give, I am actually very conscientious. I only use for myself time-pockets of, shall we say, natural wastage where i would otherwise be doing low-value work which can easily be done at another time.

Thirdly it isn't nowadays an easy thing to 'just change job'. It can take years to ensure the next job isn't going to be inferior in some or all ways to the current one. Never has competition been higher for any given job. Changing a job isn't for the faint-hearted, especially when the current one is stable and long-term permanent

I suppose the whole "ethics" thing may be a generational thing. As a youth in the 60s, and my years in the military, it was a core principle. How-ever, the younger people now serving do not have the same ideas. They are pretty well paid now, and are content to spend much of their time with social activities. Leaving the actual work to us older folks (say 55 to 68 years old) who already served 20 to 40 years.

Well, until contract failure had us 'veterans' laid off for eleven months. There was a very impressive back-log awaiting our return.

Dismissing a whole generation as though they constitute a single entity rarely works as a convincing argument. Anecdotal evidence is not sufficient by itself to support anything.

Rev Nick, I would say that a lot depends on the nature of the work. There may be periods of intense activity, followed by slack periods. Think of the farming year or the lulls between meals in a restaurant. Granted, in the Winter a farmer can mend fences outside or do repairs in the barn or house when no actual crops are growing. And in a restaurant there may be onions to chop and dishes to wash.

When I was a librarian, I didn't dare be seen reading books or newspapers on the reference desk. Patrons notice these things, and are seldom happy when they see them. However, I never heard a peep about having the BBC's website open on my computer. Obviously I must have been staying up to date on current events, or maybe learning about that piece of toast that *always* lands on the floor butter side down

Anyway, I owe H2g2 and the BBC a lot for keeping me up to date on a number of things that were happening in the world.

Also, how is the burden on the employee, with no thoughts about employers who could be getting more out of their workers by arranging more challenging, interesting work schedules?

Soldiers have slack time, too. What should they be doing or thinking during those times? I'm interested in hearing your take on this.

i'm inclined to agree with Rev Nick. If you have a contract of employment, then you are stealing from your employer if you spend time during work hours doing something that is not to do with your job.
I daresay there are few people who haven't 'stolen' trivial items or resources, but of course all these add up. It's also unfair to colleagues who are more conscientious.
That's not to say I agree with the huge inequalities of pay in many large organisations.

In my job there's nearly aways something that can be done to fill in slack time, the sort of tasks that are desirable but don't have time allocated to do them.

Well, after the last contract change, I got a significant pay cut, lost time off and my health insurance costs went up, and this was after our work group repeatedly put in outstanding performance.

So, I'm not feeling particularly well appreciated.

OH YEAH... Not to mention Trump recently declared two federal holidays. One was a Day of Mourning for Bush, the Elder. And next Monday is one for Xmas eve. My employer, a decided not to observe the federal holiday for Bush but did "allow" us to use "administrative pay" (normally used for deaths in the family and jury duty)... If you had any remaining. And since we work at a federal facility, we couldn't go in to work even if wanted to. For Xmas eve we're not even getting that option. We have to use PTO (paid time off, once called vacation and sick time) IF we have any available. I've never had a contract that was stingy when the center was closed.