During Uni. I worked very briefly as a hand for construction workers, via a temp agency. The most common task was to clean up the work site, and one fall we worked on this very long apartment project - I'm not sure exactly how long it was, but we only worked on the sides. Huge scaffold wrapped the building, and I'd walk around collecting trash.

My first day on the job, I worked pretty fast. I collected all the trash I could find, and when I was done, I sat down for probably 10 minutes trying to figure out what to do next. We were few people, and the worksite was pretty big.

During lunch, I get a call from my supervisor at the temp agency - she sounds worried and asks what is happening? Apparently one of the construction managers had briefly observed me sitting down, and immediately called my supervisor to inform her that I was not working, and that this arrangement was not working out. They wanted to booted off, and replaced with another temp worker ASAP. We agreed that I'd work "extra hard, and walk the extra mile" rest of that shift.

One hour into next part of the shift, I find out that there's not much more to do. All the trash has been collected - and I have 3 hours left. I kind of just say fuck it to myself, and start walking from one side of the project to the other, carrying the same bags of trash. I'm doing this non-stop for 3 hours.

I continue doing this for the next days, whenever I'm out of actual things to do.

My supervisor calls me, excited, and says I'm now getting glowing reviews from the site managers - and asks me if I want to extend the contract by 4 weeks.

Years later I end up working for a shitty firm that monitored keyboard activity, your desk presence (via movement sensors on the desks!), and a range of other frightening KPIs. Once again, I end up "refactoring" code all day long - essentially just moving blocks of code up and down, doing no real change to the code. I got "exceeds expectations", but soon jump ship.