How Howie Survived – 9

Unworking is a term of art. It is not  simply not working, it is doing things which are anti-work.

It takes careful planning to properly unwork. The value is that it is a bit damaging to the business. Damaging, not to the point of bankruptcy or suicide, but wasting time and work hours.

Unworking needs to be performed in such a manner that nothing  links the unworker.

The easiest act was to take a file from the pending tray on his desk and put it back into the file cabinet. What ever needed to be done on the file would not be.

The second easy act was to misfile a document, so that something which belongs in the Webster file would be placed in the Walker File.

If Stan asked Howie if he worked on the McMaster file he would make a confused face, search his desk and it would not be there. Stan Satan would search his desk and not find it. The file clerk might find the file returned to the cabinet.

How did it get there?

Howie, in his stage two of unworking, file McMaster under ‘N’. So that it wouldn’t be found easily.

That was one trick.

Another would be to cut the power to the office for a few seconds. This would cause the loss of all items on a computer that were not saved.

The way the offices were situated, where the switch was, enabled him to do a quick flick and get to his desk, before Satan came out of his office.

Howie would be watching his computer reboot as Stan Satan asked him what happened, and all he would say is, “All of a sudden my computer shut off,” which meant that he ‘lost’ everything and could pretend to be working on a saved document for the remainder of the day.

He spent much of his non-working day planning his unworking, so was never bored.