One of the first things I realized when I got what was at the time called a "real job", was just how much time can be wasted in an office. You can make yourself look busy doing just about anything, and it may take months, or even years for your superiors to learn that you never worked at all. When I worked as a brick layer, making obscenely expensive driveways for overpriced log homes in Whistler, it was immediately evident to my employer how quickly I was working. I was either laying bricks in the ground or I was not, in which case I would be asked why I was not laying bricks in the ground. We even used to joke about the city workers who would gather round in a circle, perhaps 5 of them, to take turns at digging a hole, or changing a manhole; one person digging while the other four adopted a Ken Dryden pose with their work shovels.

When I was hired at that first job, I wasn't hired to solve some immediate problem or produce immediate results. I was hired based on some expectation of future results, which obviously cannot be determined until that future date, and even at that time there are hundreds of reasons why you didn't meet expecations. In an office, you could squeeze 6 months of employment by looking busy; walking around looking stressed, carrying papers everywhere, going on sales calls that don't exist. If I had tried to pull that off while laying bricks I would have been gone by the time the coffee truck made its first visit.

What is even more alarming is that the higher you go in the organization, the more nebulous and vague the job description becomes, and the longer it takes to get fired. It is assumed that you have reached such lofty status by providing great returns to your employer, so you are left to wallow the time away for up to a year before any suspicions are raised.

This reminds me of a story I heard from the COO of one of the big five accounting firms. He had been planning to fire an executive named Sam, but company policy dictated that he do it in person, not over the phone or by email, which is becoming more and more popular these days. Sam worked and lived in Dallas, and the COO was not going to fly to Dallas just to can his ass. Business often took him to Dallas, so he figured he would just do it whenever he got there. Sam knew he was going to get the bullet, and he knew the COO had to do it in person, so he kept a suitcase in his office, which he used to make timely getaways whenever he heard the COO was coming to town.

"Suitcase Sam" was able to keep up this game for over a year, until one day, at a seemingly safe company cocktail party in Australia, he was confronted by the COO, and summarily terminated.