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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

This week, we're delving into the mailbag of tales generated by recent On-Calls about the reader paid £35k to do nothing for three months and another paid to do nothing for a year.

Reader “Henry” reckons he has them covered with a three-year stint of paid nothing. Henry tells us he once worked as a “software engineer/statistician in the manufacturing division of a large computer manufacturer” where “I had just come off writing an advanced language compiler and run-time, and before that working on an operating system.” At that time the company decided it needed to work on a manufacturing quality initiative. Henry's twin skill sets made him a fine candidate and he scored the job.

“I was ready ready to hit the ground running … just as soon as management reached consensus on the quality measurements to be done,” Henry tells us.

That consensus was some time in coming, so “In the next two years, I coached a different manager through his Master’s in computer science, but mostly played a lot of a character-cell predecessor of Civilization.”

After two years of that, Henry decided he needed a slightly more productive gig. So he had himself assigned to “a distributed system research team composed of academics at a nearby engineering school.”

Henry's first assignment there was “to port all the distributed systems software to DOS … just as soon as project management decided which of three candidate network stacks to use.”

Cue another year of waiting and playing, this time Battlezone, “For a year, before I quit.”

Can any Soylentils beat this?

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