Asking for a friend here ;-) What if you can't do what's expected, even in 40+ hours? Sometimes the next ticket is "fix something that is unfixable" and until you've spent a long time on it, had your soul sucked out and stomped on, you aren't moving on to anything else. The only thing that counts is "hours wasted on the task". As in "welp, you've spent 60 hours on this, I guess it is unfixable".

My friend worries that if they weren't warming the seat for ages, they would be seen as useless because there are weeks where they just seem to get nothing done.