GB News
A top American bank has fired a dozen employees following claims that they were using devices to convince bosses they were working at home.
Some workers allegedly used “mouse movers” to give the “impression of active work”.
During lockdown, products known as “mouse jigglers” were bought by employees across the globe to give the impression they were working while actually being away from their desks.
US firm Wells Fargo sacked employees in its wealth and investment management department following claims workers were using the devices. More
US Bank also caught employees “simulating work.” Here
Amazon offers a wide variety mouse “jigglers” and “movers” to fit every occasion, apparently Here
I used one for years to keep the pc from blanking or going to ‘sleep’.
@GoB — Same here. Back in the dark ages of dial-up it could take several minutes to log on again only to find you’d lost your work.
Who dafuq they think they are?
Teamsters?
Gummint workers?
UAW?
CWA?
SEIU?
The nerve!
mortem tyrannis
izlamo delenda est …
I worked with a guy who could sleep upright at his desk in his cubicle and had the ability to move his mouse just enough to keep his screen “awake”. Of course I worked with others that did not care enough if their screens were black as they stared at their phones in their laps….
FJB
In pre-mouse days I had a tiny script that would loop through a display of system time and then sleep for 30 seconds. This put minimum load on system/network but kept me connected.
A small program can make the mouse pointer move in any desired pattern. No one is actually detecting your hand’s motion, just the OS is reporting on movement and/or position to an app or service.
Thieving thieves gonna thieve … AKA never masturbate on your own time, never sweat on the boss’ time.
At foist I thot this wuz for people with vewy tiny homes…
I work with computers all day lomg, programming machines with real-world outputs instead of IT systems true, but the principle is the same in that I think monitoring metrics like keystrokes and mouse movements is probably the stupidest way to watch your employees.
Speaking for myself but knowing others that do this, often when faced with a programming issue I may just stare a hole in the screen until the logic makes sense, which wouldnt show up in a keystroke monitor but is necessary for me to engage my own onboard electrochemical logic processor. Just because Im not pushing keys or moving pointers doesnt mean Im not working; quite the opposite in fact, Im doing the mental gymnastics behind my eyes that they are REALLY paying me for, which the system obviously cant do for itself but isnt really an externally measurable thing until my final output is to make the machine work.
They COULD give one of my laptops to any number of people, who COULD make a show of tapping keys, opening files, dragging and dropping things, but this spastic (but quantifiable!) activity is unlikely to yield useful results apart from making the time management guy happy, at least until the company collapses because the machines dont actually work.
…to me, a BETTER metric is results. If you have X amount of whatever Wells Fargo has to do that needs to get done, say entering data from customer forms into a database, then set a goal for that and judge on completeness and accuracy by random audit. You can measure it, you can increase it to find each workers max output, and average between them based on that for an expected daily output.
If one guys so good he can do all his work in between quarters of sportsball, what do you care as long as it gets done and correctly? You can increase quantites periodically to see if theres a falloff, but maybe the guy you think is good NOW because he exceeds your metric of keystrokes, is only doing so because he constantly screws up and has to do it again.
All Im saying is hold people to getting your work done but dont worry about HOW they get your work done, and just accept that theres more than one way to bend a Cotter pin but it doesnt matter as long as they all get bent.
A productive and happy workplace will be your reward.
No jiggling required.
I thought lying and cheating were in the WF Mission Statement.
This stuff happens so often there, everyone must assume it’s expected
Valid points above, all.
“You get the beans you count.”
The beancounters need to find the beans that matter.
Guilty as charged. My reason for using one was if you walked away from your pc it would log out in a matter of minutes…happened a lot when I would leave my desk to use a micro height or comparator. Of course, the damn password was a mile long. So, “Mouse Jiggler” to the rescue.
CJ
SATURDAY, 15 JUNE 2024, 10:04 AT 10:04 AM
“Guilty as charged. My reason for using one was if you walked away from your pc it would log out in a matter of minutesβ¦happened a lot when I would leave my desk to use a micro height or comparator. ”
…I work on the floor in a factory environment most of the time, and because of that I would NEVER turn my back on my computer unlocked. It never happened to me, but occasionally I will get a mass email from someone who DID leave theirs open, only to find that in their absence someone had typed out an invitation to a gay hot oil party and spammed it from their email all over the plant.
For that, and other reasons, even though it means entering a long, cryptic password (TWICE in the one I have a Win7 Virtual Machine running on), I will lock my screen before walking away.
I DID prank my buddy once for that tho, in a little bit different way. I wrote a horny email to the female owner of the company in his name and sent it to a (hopefully) non-existant, made-up email address with her name incorporated in it so he’d see a sent email on his desktop when he came back.
I made sure to be there and let him sweat a bit before letting him off the hook, but the freakout was kinda fun to watch as he vocally contemplated how he would explain to his wife the reason he got fired.
…he had a heart attack at work a few days later, hope I didnt contribute to that, but he had a beef valve installed and retired, and Capatin Beefheart now cruises the Carribbean with that same wife, so all’s well that ends well…
Put simply, itβs theft.
Maybe this is a good way to weed out dead weight.
If one of my employees figured out how to get money out of me without working, he/she would be gone.
This is a 16 year oldsβ first-job mentality. How to get by without doing anything.
Iβm so glad I retired 7 years ago.
Yeah, I think My Commercial Rooftop HVAC Rates just went up another $10 bucks/hr.
(I’m really getting disgusted by Paper Pushers)
SNS – That email situation was funny.
I agree, so I would turn my screen off and back on when I got back to my desk to avoid anyone getting onto my pc and doing silly stuff to it. However, I used a site that made it look like you received the “blue screen of death” and I did that several times to a few of my co-workers when I a prank was needed. The looks on their faces when they thought they screwed up their pc and I just happen to walk by saying the mouse jiggler program (they used it as well) caused mine to crash and wiped out the entire system.
There was also, on that same site, a screen to make it look like your pc was going through a Windows update and you could be gone for 20-30 minutes or so and none was the wiser. I never used it as my job was extremely busy and I practically needed every minute of the day, but a couple of co-workers did and said it worked great. Effing lazy bums…haha
Kcir – paper pushers and pencil whippers!