Mouse Jiggler 2.0.25

[Aron Eugine]

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2020 will forever be remembered as the year the world was forced to slow down and introspect. Whilst COVID-19 has caused great panic and disrupted our lives, it has also forced the business world to introspect and pivot.

By no means am I attacking those who spend their entire career "working for the man". Each person has their own journey. What I am poking at is that many people lack the confidence in themselves and only act when they have no other choice.

It is these people with great potential and little gumption who while away time in organizations; not giving up their seat for the young graduate who is eager to enter the workplace and add value. These people ARE the Mouse Jigglers!

I earnestly appeal to organizations who are still playing Big Brother with their employees to reevaluate themselves. You can have the best strategy in your industry, but if your culture is one of constant surveillance; and your fearful staff continue to jiggle their mouse for a paycheck; your chances of succeeding is at risk.

And to the Mouse Jigglers, do you want to look back in twenty or thirty years on your mouse jiggling antics with pride? Or will you be consumed with the regret of not giving up your seat and doing something you are proud of?

Yes this. Also, I know many of my co-workers will block time in their planners for certain tasks so no meetings get scheduled over that time. Teams will show them as in a meeting, when in fact they are just working behind their laptop alone. So I will message or call them if I need them, and if they are busy they will ignore me. They know I will only do that if I have a good reason and I have no problem with being ignored.

You need to open your eyes if you think everyone is the office is actually productive all day. I have worked with some people who excelled at looking busy while accomplishing nothing for hours each day.

You can adjust the pop-up notifications. Unless your company has disabled user-access to all settings, you should be able to turn off the pop-ups and just leave the red button with a number in it notification.

I worked at a company and I thought they were turning on my camera remotely, so I disabled, if it suddenly became enabled I knew they were watching me in my own home, they never but it was an external camera, so I would have definitely pulled the plug on it

I often work on things that are 90% paper/book and 10% screen. It drives me bonkers when I have to go through alllll the logins every time I need to jump to the screen parts. I just want to have my computer ready and waiting for me!!

She may have gotten it just because she did not want the screen to fall asleep if she was doing something else for a little too long. Our password requirements at my agency have led to us having really long passwords with numbers, letters, special characters, etc., and we have to change them every 90 days. It is a pain to type it in more often than necessary! That is reason enough!

My current job is really insane with making us change passwords every 45 days. My screen goes to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity, which if I had it set to lock on inactivity would inspire me to get a mouse jiggler.

Still, if I need to go to the bathroom it can take 15 minutes if I have an IBS moment. I would be furious if someone was nitpicking my computer use all day. I know that in my job there is often hours of skull time before I even open an editor to make a new script or document. I do some of my best thinking in the bathroom, FFS. If I was judged on keystrokes or mouse movement or some idiot piece of software deciding whether I was online or not I would rapidly be looking elsewhere.

Quite frankly, I think this company and manager has shown the OP exactly what they think of them and what they consider a true measure of work. The OP needs to find a new company where people are respected and judged on their actual output, not how long they stare at a screen.

Yeah, I am an attorney, and if I have a big hearing coming up, I rehearse opening statements or closing arguments, anticipated legal arguments, etc., away from my computer. I mean, in reality, you have to be able to think on your feet, but it helps to be prepared, to think through your talking points. I get up and away from my computer to do this, but it is still work. And I also have IBS, so I totally feel you there!

Calling it wage theft is especially ridiculous if she is exempt (which I assume she is). Just like they do not have to pay overtime if she works longer hours, she still gets paid the same if she has less than 40 hours of work to do in that week. She gets paid to perform her job duties, not by the hour, so it cannot be wage theft unless she is salaried and non-exempt, and it does not sound like that is the case.

Ah, I just never click. Moving the mouse every so often when reading/staring at something, via touchpad, is pretty much a reflex now. (And tap-clicking on a computer is evil to me so all tapping/gestures are disabled on my laptop touchpads.)

And really, unless you need to be in a specific place at a specific time or available very specific hours, employers should be focused on output and not on time. You figure out if your teleworker is doing their job or not by monitoring whether their work is getting done, not their active screen time. So anyone thinking this is a sign that remote employees are taking naps and watching tv should not be saying that it is a sign remote work is a problem, but that it is a sign that the managers of said company do not know how to do their jobs.

yes and no. If the lockscreen is set really short and you have to sometimes read physical documents and then occasionally take a note on screen, it can be really annoying to have to do the whole unlock rigamarole every ten minutes (and loose the thought you wanted to take a note of) while sitting right in front of the screen the whole time. The (obviously permissible) alternate solution is just randomly jiggling the mouse yourself every so often.

Honestly, I had never heard of one before today and I would have no reason to tell my boss because I am exempt, I do some work not on the computer, and I have no reason to assume my boss is tracking it. And if I cannot install something, the IT people will have it blocked. I would certainly not be getting one on the belief that they were going to be monitoring it to see if I am on the computer or what my active screen time is. The idea that they would do that is bizarre to me.

If I am sitting there reading a large paper file right by my computer, there is no risk to the computer or its content. I just do not want it to fall asleep while I am working on reading the case because I will want to look up and check the email if it pings. It is no greater security issue than if I were working on the computer in that case.

They can be measured the same way, but that likely means the job will be considered non-exempt, so salaried, but with requirements to pay overtime. It is a thing. My agency had a huge mess to deal with a few years back when they realized they had misclassified a large group of employees who were and are salaried as exempt! It was a crazy time.

She is salaried, and therefore likely exempt. She does not have to work 40 hours a week to get her salary, and they do not have to pay her overtime if she works more than 40 hours a week. Because she is not paid for her time, but her work product. So there is no wage theft from taking a longer break or any of that. For all we know, she could have IBS and sometimes need longer bathroom breaks, but does not want to have to log back in each time. Or she just needs a longer break after finishing something really complicated and requiring a lot of brain energy. That is one of the reasons exempt roles are exempt.

Oh man, this triggered a random memory. Pre-pandemic. My computer (a laptop) had been running hot all day. I was trying to run analytics on some pretty big data sets, and my computer kept overheating. I wasted a couple hours running analytics that should have taken 10 minutes. Finally I shut down the computer, walked to the office kitchen and put it into the freezer for 5 minutes.

Agree. She is the one who installed the jiggler. My company does not monitor it but I still would never do it. OP, you got caught. Next job or the job after that may monitor as well. Accept the write up, remove the jiggler and move on.

Then they must have also had lazy or inattentive managers to let them get away with having such minimal productivity. Employers that refuse to actually assess results are going to run into these problems.

I know. Before we went digital with our cases, I got them printed out and read them on paper. My computer screen staying on all the time would have meant I was not reading my cases. Sure, that could be because I was emailing, researching, or drafting something, but it could just as easily be me watching youtube videos or browsing reddit!

When I am doing work I am supposed to do, I am sometimes not doing clicking or typing. Sometimes I am scrolling. Sometimes I am reading something on good old fashioned paper. Sometimes I am preparing an opening or closing argument (which I do in my head). Honestly, if I am always clicking and typing, I am not doing some major key parts of my job!

I hated that. As a later-arriving person, I used to tell those smug early birds (who often finished their grooming and ate breakfast at work) that they were digesting their dinner while I was still in the office. So very stupid.

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