People often look at the government workers in America as being lazy or sitting around doing nothing, but now Germany has a story to one-up us. In a farewell email sent to 500 fellow employees, a retiring engineer in a North Rhine-Westphalia state surveying office admitted to spending the last 14 years “doing nothing” and getting paid €745,000. It wasn’t that he refused to do his work though. Because of poor management and a lack of structure in the department, he always came to work with nothing being put on his schedule. Instead of being proactive and asking for some work, he chose to show up and keep his chair warm by doing nothing.
For some reason the man thought that the email would not be seen by anyone but the 500 people he sent it to, but it did and had government officials outraged by the news. Luckily by that time the man was already retired and there doesn’t appear to be any action being taken against him for his lack of work. Instead, his former job has been eliminated from the department.
Photo by star5112 via flickr
