I Was Paid for 7 Months for Doing Nothing

The hardest part of each day was making up entries for the timecard system

It was the second week of May and I strolled into my corner office on a Monday morning.

I loved my office. It was on the second floor of a pretty humdrum building, but my office looked out into a well-manicured garden. I had many peaceful mornings holding my morning joe, meditatively staring out into the colorful landscaping.

That one morning felt a little different. It was certainly peaceful. I didn’t have that foreboding feeling of stress welling up in my gut typical of many Mondays.

I got in a little before 8am. The rest of the department hadn’t yet started to trickle in. As I stared out into the quad gathering my thoughts, my mind idly wandered back to the previous week.

Flashback

The Friday before, we all attended a mandatory company meeting. Around 10am, without any warning, my supervisor summoned everyone in the department and asked each of us to go to a nearby hotel.

Everyone was to drop what they were doing. This was an order coming straight from the C-suite.

What the heck?

It was the first week of May. The little cliques in the team formed impromptu carpools and we all set out to the meeting.

Upon arriving, we were directed into a large banquet hall. Obviously, the company had reserved these rooms in advance. There were large coffee dispensers and boxes and boxes of donuts and bagels. There were calories aplenty. It may have been impromptu for us, but quite some thought had gone into planning this mysterious event.

There was a buzz in the crowd. There was a sense of general confusion. Murmurs went up and down the aisles where we were seated while balancing donuts in tiny Dixie plates on our laps.

From what I could tell, the entire company was indeed present. Coworkers gave knowing nods to each other, raising their coffees in greeting. Mimed questions were met with shrugs. Shrugs were met with more shrugs.

Finally, the big cheese gets up to the front. After the requisite greetings and the anticipated-and-not-surprising-at-all opening line “I’m sure you’re all wondering why you’re here,” he wasted no time in getting to the point.

He had sold the company.

We were getting acquired by a large foreign company. The company he had built from zero to about 250 employees was joining a conglomerate of over 12000 employees.

He was beaming from ear to ear as he talked. Why wouldn’t he? He probably just banked nine figures. The rest of us were a bit uneasy. I looked at my supervisor seated three chairs over.

He gave me a reassuring smile and gestured for me to keep my attention to the CEO — the Chief Exiting Officer.

Over the next hour, the big man went over his reason for selling — he was simply looking to retire, and the offer was not one he could pass up. He promised that the familial culture would remain in place. The parent company would leave well alone and let the company run autonomously, business as usual. Our jobs were safe. Our benefits were safe.

The meeting was just an announcement and a formality, he said. Everything would be back to normal come the following Monday.

Life in the Acquisition — the Beginning

Well, the following Monday was not business as usual. All projects were put on hold.

The directive from the parent company was that new projects would be handed down. Whatever we were working on was basically canceled. The marketing department promptly sent out an email telling everyone to come by and grab whatever merch we wanted.

Since the previous company no longer existed, all merchandise emblazoned with the company branding were no longer of any value. Coffee mugs, laptop bags, hats, T-Shirts, notepads, journals and all kinds of knick-knacks were up for grabs.

I still have a bunch of merch from that free-for-all.

We couldn’t really do much in our department as our computers on our local network were yet to be connected to the mothership. Sure, our servers still allowed us to connect to each other and pointlessly check emails, but since our new company identities and credentials were going to be issued by the parent company, our local network remained as an isolated island.

The sync-up was going to happen in a few weeks. A few weeks!

There was no date set for the sync. So, what did we do? We showed up each day for work as usual. On time, professionally dressed, but lacking an agenda for the week.

At the end of each week, we had to log into the company portal, indicate our start and end times and what we accomplished.

Well, that was the hard part.

None of us wanted to admit that we sat around and talked about movies. Or told dirty jokes. Or played nerf basketball. Or sent each other memes and watched YouTube videos.

Even all that work fun got old. We felt useless and unproductive. I know I felt guilty entering bogus information about supposedly reading up on some new technology or watching training videos.

I’m sure the parent company knew that our “accomplishments” were more than a little frivolous. It was on them to get us up and going in short order.

Life in the Acquisition — Invisible

It took about four weeks to get connected to the large company network.

After that, I met with a project manager from another city. This was way before remote work and remote meetings were a normal part of the workday. Having a meeting with someone from a different country felt very other-worldly. Very advanced.

It felt as though the beginning of something epic was about to take hold.

Except it didn’t.

I was bounced from one project manager to another as each group tried to make my role fit. As a developer, I had a lot of flexibility of where I could apply my skills. I would find that either my skillset was not right with a particular group, or I was joining a group that was already in full flight and that meant no one could take the time to properly onboard me.

In a few cases, I was given some minimal Excel work. Sure, my job was safe. I was employed but they couldn’t seem to find the right slot for me.

Between these little gigs bouncing from one group to another, I would go weeks at a time literally showing up for work every day, goofing around with other unassigned teammates, and then clocking out.

The weeks turned into months. At the longest stretch, I went 9 weeks without talking to anyone from the parent company. My supervisor before the acquisition was no longer my direct supervisor. Supposedly, the person I reported to was some dude in another city who rarely reached out to me. I got the feeling he had forgotten he had another resource in me that he could use. My previous supervisor was not in the position to assign me work anymore.

I was invisible.

I know I wasn’t the only one who got lost in the system. But there I was in my corner office bored out of my mind. Reaching out to my supposed superiors got no responses.

Each Friday evening, I had to come up with something to enter in my timesheets. It got to the point where I simply entered “N/A” in the accomplishments text boxes.

I probably should have just started looking for a new job. But I was hopeful. I did want to be part of that large company.

Since the merger in May, the weeks and months dragged on, each week going slower and more mind-numbingly boring.

Before I knew it, it was December and I had had enough. I started looking for new employment. Incidentally, within the same week that I gave notice, I was called into a meeting to tell me that I was being laid off.

Because I had given two weeks notice, I took the next two weeks off to use up some of my PTO. When I left “for vacation” that Friday, I actually went to work for my new employer the very next Monday.

I was still technically employed, and still very much invisible at the old job, as I settled into my new job.

I showed up “after my vacation” to pick up my last check and complete my exit interview. Though, I didn’t really see the point since I had disappeared in the cracks months ago.

Some may dream of getting paid for doing nothing, but in my case, it was mental torture, something I never want to experience again.