your job sucks

Why does it matter?

• a solo freelancer

just put a spoon on your trackpad

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

I'm going to give you a mega useful tip.

You need to create a group. You can kick the user later and say it was an accident. Then you start a meet inside of that group. You can be the only one in the call. Change your status from Busy to available again on top. Just leave yourself muted inside of that Teams call. Your Teams will never go inactive and neither will your laptop.

I do get that this is the real differentiator to businesses in a chat app. how much it spies on employees. we need to unionize yesterday in tech

• 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.

Wow we are all slaves. :( I type this between my Teams meetings.

Super simple to write a script that prevents it.

FTTY

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.)

have your free bot fix it while you get stuff done. i'd just make mine yellow all the time. wut is teams?

I was getting marked as "away" in Microsoft Teams every day, even though I was working. I just wasn't using Microsoft Teams, so it marked me as idle.

I wrote this Autohotkey script after my boss started complaining. It clicks on Teams every 2 minutes:

global running := 0

^+1::
{
	global running := 1
	while running == 1
	{
        CoordMode("Mouse", "Screen")
        oldx := 0
        oldy := 0
        MouseGetPos(&oldx, &oldy)
        prev_active := WinActive("A")

        Try
        {
            WinActivate("ahk_class TeamsWebView")
        }
        Catch TargetError as e
        {
        }
        CoordMode("Mouse", "Window")
        Send("{Click 80 40 Left}")

        Try
        {
            WinActivate("ahk_id " prev_active)
        }
        Catch TargetError as e
        {
        }
        CoordMode("Mouse", "Screen")
        MouseMove(oldx, oldy, 0)

        sleep(115000)
	}
}

^+2::
{
	global running := 0
}

It has the side effect of preventing my computer from entering screensaver/lock screen when I really am away.

I used bots for games 20 years ago, I mean it should be easy to trick mouse movement...

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.

🖇️ can help? same guy