Recently, Reddit user u/One_Tumbleweed_565 asked the good people of r/AskUK, "what have you been getting away with at work, apart from doing f**k all, that's gone unnoticed?" Here are some of the best and most scandalous replies...
1. "Farting. I'm really, really good at silent farts, and weirdly, no one ever suspects me. They blame it on Janice every time."
2. "Walking my dog. On my at-home days, I take my dogs out for up to two hours to the fields and the woods. I manage to get a pretty good signal out there, so I've replied to messages, and emails whilst sitting on a log watching them eat mud."
"I had a friend many years ago who went on a skiing holiday, but still took calls and emails at the top of the mountain 'cause they didn't have annual leave."
3. "Everyone thinks I'm being helpful and cleaning up when I carry the pallets outside… Nah, I'm fussing the cat that lives out there."
"You're providing support to your colleague in pest control, if anyone asks."
4. "I'm in the office three days a week. Because WFH is so widespread now, I'd say 75% of the time there's nobody in the office who I have anything to do with. So I've realised that nobody is aware of what time I leave. I've started leaving at like 4:15. It's great."
5. "I join every Zoom meeting a few minutes late to avoid the awkward small talk."
"We only need small talk because of the late people!"
6. "I stick googly eyes on everything. Plant pots, monitors, the tea tin, the milk. Everything. I do it openly, I don't hide it, and yet no one has noticed it's me. I started an entire year ago and have convinced the cleaner not to pick them off."
7. "About once a week, a colleague and I take the opportunity to sneak away for a few minutes to make out. We haven't been caught (yet)."
8. "My previous employer was lax as fuck with IT equipment. Every year, my team would put a requisition request in for new laptops, and every year IT would send us each a brand new, top-spec PC."
"Not once did they ask for the old machine back, and the department manager was completely uninterested, so we kept them. I must have had upwards of £10k worth of laptops from that place in the handful of years I worked there."
9. "I'm an on-site plumber on a very large industrial site. I keep all the scrap metal, organise it, and weigh it in every three months. I make around £200-300 each time."
"No one knows I've been doing this for at least five years now. It's my way of sticking it to the man (and also helping out the planet slightly)."
10. "My job wants me to clean using only water, but I sneak in some chemicals to get the job done properly. You're just not getting grease and grime off a floor using only hot water."
"A £5, five-litre bottle of degreaser makes my job so much shorter."
11. "I once had a temporary agency warehouse job. I reported to all the right people, but wasn't on anyone's list. I still got paid. I spent the next six months wandering around with an empty cardboard box doing bugger all and still getting paid!"
12. "I wrote a novel during my probation period at my most recent job."
13. "I used to work in a big chain supermarket and my manager was an absolute legend. At the end of every shift, he would tell us to help ourselves to anything that was just about to go out of date. Anything that was leftover from that (which was a lot), he would take with him and hand it out to the homeless."
"His attitude to the upper management was 'fuck them, none of us get paid enough to give a fuck'. RIP to that legend..."
14. "I serviced offices which were only about half occupied. I had to walk around the building a few times a day to do a series of checks and had a keycard for all the rooms. One empty office was used to store furniture — including a load of cushions."
"I built myself a little den in there and would go for a lay down every day to look at my phone or read a book — I could be in there for an hour or so each day. I also took the leftover food from people's catered meetings and gave it to homeless people on my way home (it was all wrapped and in date)."
15. "My wages have been wrong for the past six years. I'm supposed to be on a lower wage band — instead, I've been getting £167 more every week! Woop woop..."
16. "When someone sends me a message asking, 'do you have a minute?' or 'can we have a quick call?', I'll pretend I didn't see the message and give it an hour. After that, I'll reply with 'sorry, was busy', and most of the time they've solved whatever is troubling them by themselves."
17. "I constantly turn a blind eye to shoplifting because I can't justify humiliating or punishing someone for having little to no choice but to steal something they need. We're talking about things like band-aids, tampons, etc. that they obviously can't afford."
18. "I haven't bought a battery in years."
19. "I ran a mobile website from the work servers. It was the third-biggest mobile site at the time — I even used work's fax machines to send in my invoices."
20. "I wrote the word 'taters' in tiny places all over work over the course of a year or so, until the manager finally had to announce to everyone that whoever was doing it needed to stop."
H/T to u/One_Tumbleweed_565 and r/AskUK for having this discussion.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Thumbnail credits: NBC/ Fox/ Nickelodeon / Universal Pictures /