your job sucks
Why does it matter?
- a solo freelancer
Just here to flex?
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.
If anyone is wondering yes, it can see that you were in a meeting by yourself all day
I just always have mine set to show away. Management stops noticing when you are yellow in meetings regularly.
I open notepad and shut the laptop lid halfway on the enter key. Always green, always working.
Hmm, I just open notepad and use a stack of coins or something similar to hold down a key to stay active if I need to.
It’s stupid we even have to care about our status on teams. Why should anyone give a fuck about your teams status as long as you’re getting to your work done properly and on time?
Although to be fair right now I’m using a client laptop so my employer basically sees me as offline all the time but I’m reachable by teams or email on my phone.
Anyways it’s just dumb. Fun trick though, I didn’t know you could do that.
There’s a tool for Windows called Caffeine that simulates pressing the F15 key, which is almost never used by any software being that most keyboards don’t have function keys that go that high.
From the webpage:
If you have problems with your PC locking or going to sleep, caffeine will keep it awake. It works by simulating a keypress once every 59 seconds, so your machine thinks you’re still working at the keyboard, so won’t lock the screen or activate the screensaver.
I can’t install unapproved software on my work laptop, probably like most others hence I ain’t messing with that.
For what it’s worth, with Caffeine, it’s a single, portable executable, so it doesn’t need to be installed in the conventional sense, but if your IT department monitors processes or whitelists what is allowed to run, this would still be a problem.
The best is to get a physical mouse jiggler
Preferably one that moves your current mouse. The USB dongles all have the same hardware id and can be tracked.
What’s does F15 does? My keyboard only goes to F12
It’s up to application software to define what it does. I have never seen a keyboard with function keys beyond F12 in person, but they do exist. Software is very unlikely to respond to F15, which is why Caffeine uses it to keep the system awake. Notably, the program can also instruct Windows to stay awake using its native mechanism instead (possibly insufficient for something like MS Teams) or another virtual key code of the user’s specification.
F12 and F3
This is a good tip. I haven’t used it in a while but you can also log into it from web interfaces so i think it was possible to shutdown the desktop app and log into it from other places where it didn’t have the same kind of access.
I’ll go one step further and hope their both sides of their pillow are warm from fresh piss. What a totally asshole decision.
just put a spoon on your trackpad
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.
…Have you considered finding a new job, perhaps?
I mean it took me all of 20 minutes. They have the screenshots saved in the folder, the JSON just is a time stamp and a list of urls I looked at in that time.
For sure, I just hate the idea of my employer spying on me constantly. I guess ones that don’t are few and far between these days.
FTTYI opened my email and it fucking defaulted to Copilot. Like, bitch I clicked my email. Not your half baked AI bullshit.
perfection
Wow we are all slaves. :( I type this between my Teams meetings.
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.)
A bad boss can really make a job suck. If it was me I’d get a mouse wiggler, apparently there’s a surprisingly many physical ‘mouse movers’ out there nowadays.
People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.
The saying is true for 95% of jobs. People don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses.
Back when my company was using teams I had a script that would press a button that’s not actually on my keyboard (something like F25) every minute, so my teams was always green and it was not noticeable from my point of view
My boss bills customers for his on-site visits (technical) wherein he goes on site, plugs in his laptop, and makes me remotely do all his work remotely. I can’t wait to burn this bridge when the time is right.
There’s a natural divot on my desk that does it for me.
But I also have my outlook calendar filled with my scheduled hours so my status shows I am always busy (working my schedules hours).
So hasn’t been a problem and it’s been years.
Mine tells me to take all appointments and do all errands i’d need to take off on my wfh days.
If i’m idle during those I still get the nasty grams, and 50/50 on any of them he asks if I took the day off because he doesn’t see it in the team calendar or HR’s PTO official system, even though there’s zero expectation for us to take PTO for a doctor’s appointment or other errand that takes a couple of hours at any point.
Guy has taken a day and a half this week to work on his own personal stuff without requesting PTO. I took 1.5 hours on one day and got nastygrams (the “I don’t see your pto in the pto calendar” (again, tells me in person not to put it in… but every time i’m remote and idle for an appointment there’s now a record in writing asking me where I am and why I didn’t take pto.)
Later, when I see the guy in person he totally understands and it’s not a problem… so what the fuck are you messaging me for like this asshole? Why? The fuck is your problem? It’s in my fucking calendar, and i’m not taking actual time off or a half day or something - so why would I put in the team wide calendar that i’m going to a doctor? They don’t need to know!
Sounds like your boss has a boss and those checkin/nasty grams are how they measure their tasks.
That implies he is also sitting around watching Teams instead…being productive.
And at the end of the day, unless you’re working at a start-up, your business won’t fail because someone wasn’t nickle-and-dime-ing individual workers on their productivity time.
Super simple to write a script that prevents it.
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 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.
Get a USB mouse jiggler. There are hundreds of them.
https://www.amazon.com/meatanty-Jiggler-Undetectable-Separate-Computer/dp/B09NVH8HVN
They are undetectable because they are just another USB Mouse.
These other solutions are so annoying. Yes let me spend the mental energy to wedge keys downs or setup fake meetings every single time I have to take a shit.
It’s important not to plug in a USB device like that into your work PC. IT can likely see what devices are used on any system.
Instead use a physical mouse mover device that only requires power, like a USB cord plugged into a wall charger instead of the PC.
Doesn’t it show up as a mouse though ? That is what I see in Windows. I have 2 mice
It likely has a distinctive vendor ID and product ID that it provides to the OS.
Not the physical mover, no. If you plug a mouse jiggler thing into your work PC and it shows up as 2 mice, then IT can see the abnormality of that anyway because we don’t use 2 mice normally.
I just put a weight on the ctrl key when I’m away or fucking around on my phone.
It’s always interesting hearing from people that this works, because I could be working solid for 2 hours straight but not actually put my cursor in the Teams application and so it thinks I’m away
I have had that happen in the past but not recently. I would think having teams be the active window while holding the key down would have the same effect though.
??
Stack of coins on the arrow key, works wonders.
Yes but I must take it off and put it every time I leave my desk
