Overemployed: I’m Beating Inflation & Wage Stagnation by Secretly Working Two Jobs

How to escape being underpaid by ‘cloning’ yourself

I’ll know I’m free from the Rat Race when I never have to sit through an uninspired meeting on Zoom or Teams ever again. I have a theory that most managers organize these largely unproductive meetings because they like to hear themselves talk in front of a captive audience.

I’ve sat in on more meetings than the President of Uganda, and mine don’t have drug-fueled after parties with Putin or Xi Jinping. Hell, I bet the three of them do more hookers and blow in one night than Hunter Biden can fit in the back of his dad’s campaign bus.

These things typically go on for about an hour, featuring the kind of artificially enthusiastic monotony that could put a room full of Dexedrine addicts into a suspended animation that would make Snow White look like an insomniac.

Although, there are occasionally brief moments of amusement. Such as the time one of our sales reps decided to present his quarterly figures while “under the weather” with a bad case of brown bottle flu and forgot the vodka bottle was still resting opened on the table next to him.

Or the moment when a customer “satisfaction” rep (Don’t you love it when companies try to make things sound better by simply renaming them?) realized she had forgotten to turn off her camera when the guy she was cheating on her husband with walked in front of it still naked. We only knew this wasn’t her husband because he was also in the meeting, joining us from the new office he’d been assigned to help launch. Good times.

I love that post-industrialism and post-modernism have joined forces to give us office drama from the comfort of our homes.

Most days, I join with my mic muted and my camera off, only showing my face when addressed or to ask a question. I blame it on the app, the internet, the weather and whichever excuse I haven’t thrown into the rotation in a while.

I even experimented with putting electrical tape over my webcam and sharing my screen to show I had turned the camera on. That one worked great until they sent me a new monitor. I have since received a new headset and laptop as well, just to eliminate all the possible sources of my technical difficulties. Who could have known that our underpaid and understaffed IT department would be so thorough?

Fortunately, with as unreliable as most technology is, there are an almost infinite number of things to blame for my invisibility that aren’t “I’m watching YouTube videos” or “Just checking Indeed to see if I can quit this shitshow yet.”

More recently, I’ve taken on a second job to see how long I can perform both of them at the same time without getting caught. It’s great, I’m getting paid hourly from two different employers for working the same hours. All while typing this story up for you fine folks on the laptop they gave me.

Don’t worry, I made sure it doesn’t have any annoying employee productivity surveillance software on it. Besides, I’m using a virtual machine behind 256-bit encryption on a VPN right now, so even the Feds would have a helluva time trying to figure out what I’m up to. My time as a bail bondsman and as a Federal employee taught me just enough about cyber security to make me an inconvenient surveillance target.

So far, I’ve managed to keep my quotas high at both positions, while juggling conflicting schedules of Zoom and Teams meetings by using two laptops and a low-tech motorized mouse jiggler. It’s a fun little dance. I mute one meeting so I can answer a question on another, a “client” (my friend Tony) calls in wanting a quote when both managers try to speak to me simultaneously.

I don’t have any fantasies about being able to keep this up forever. Sooner or later, I’ll have to ditch one of them to prevent being fired from the other. But having a dual income as a single man sure makes this economy more livable. It’s like I’ve cloned myself and we’re both clocking in together at two different jobs that happen to occupy the same office.

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