The 6 Most Ambitious Things Ever Done To Get Out Of Work

6 A Developer Outsourced His Own Job to China so He Could Watch Cat Videos

Everyone wastes a little company time surfing the Internet. Hell, you're probably reading this at work right now, in which case we feel it's our duty to inform you that your boss is standing right behind you.

But a man identified only as "Bob" (for reasons that shall become hilariously obvious) took one look at everyone else's work web habits and said, "You know what? I can do better." Bob, being a software developer, was pretty good with numbers, and when he crunched his several-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year salary against the amount for which overseas labor could be had, he came up with possibly the very best idea in the entire history of lazy-ass ideas. For a fraction of his salary (about $50,000 a year), Bob could simply outsource his own job to China.

So, Bob took his coded security fob for remote access to the company's network and shipped it to a high-tech Chinese sweatshop, then proceeded to sit at his computer and look busy while a team of developers on the other side of the planet did all his work for him. Obviously, this left Bob with a shitload of downtime, and according to his computer history he kept a pretty regular schedule. We couldn't possibly improve Bob's "work" schedule with jokes, so here it is verbatim:

9 a.m. -- Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos
11:30 a.m. -- Take lunch
1 p.m. -- eBay time
2-ish p.m -- Facebook updates -- LinkedIn
4:30 p.m. -- End of day update email to management
5 p.m. -- Go home

Apparently, replacing yourself with the equivalent of a computer-programming Megazord works, because while Bob was busy watching cats have lightsaber duels, the company was busy labeling him "the best developer in the building." Yeah, you could say that Bob had thought of everything, if it weren't for the fact that he hadn't: during a review, it came to the attention of the security team that Bob was remotely accessing the company's network -- from China -- while also sitting in his office, staring intently at his computer monitor and purposefully hitting his space bar. Either Bob was a clone, or Bob's jig was up.

Bob's story ends pretty much exactly how you'd expect it to. His intricate plan to get rich from the blood, sweat, and tears of an army of underpaid Chinese workers discovered, he was immediately promoted to CEO.

OK, he was actually fired (still, admit that we had you going there for a moment).

5 A Mailman Burned All the Mail He Was Supposed to Deliver, Drank Beer Instead

When career burnout strikes, your options are unfortunately limited. You could get a new job in the same industry, which seems like more of a temporary splint than a permanent fix. You could switch to a whole new career, but who has the time, energy, and financial security to start all over? And according to Richard Farrell, a (former) mailman from Belfair, Washington, there's one more (admittedly, probably quite satisfying) option: you can take your career, burn that motherfucker to the ground, and bury the ashes with a goddamn backhoe.

As we mentioned, good ol' Dick (may we call you Dick, Mr. Farrell? We'll just go ahead and call you Dick) was a mailman, and one day he made the mistake of looking too closely at the gross and net lines of his paycheck (don't do that, kids -- it's like staring at the sun for too long). See, Dick had fallen way behind on his taxes, and after working for the U.S. Postal Service for nearly 20 years, he came to the conclusion that he was basically working for free. And why do that, when sitting at a bar all day is also a thing that can be done for free?

So that's exactly what Dick did. He sat at a bar all day. Then he took all the mail -- the mail he was supposed to have, you know, delivered -- and torched it in a fire pit. But you can have only so many nightly bonfires before your neighbors become convinced that you're murdering accused witches back there, so to deal with the overage (we're talking 35,000 pieces of mail), Dick broke out his backhoe (because apparently his woeful salary was still adequate enough for him to own a fucking backhoe) and dug a 5-foot-by-30-foot trench in which to bury it all -- a fact that wasn't even discovered until three years after Dick was fired and sentenced to 130 hours of community service for sacrificing his deliveries to the Lord of Light.

So if you happen to have a dear old grandma in Northwest Washington who became convinced that you no longer loved her right around 2010, you have Dick to thank for it -- he's the one who buried all those letters you sent her in his backyard.

4 A Guy Sent Nonstop Text Messages Threatening to Explode His Co-Workers

James Bea had been working at financial services firm Jack Henry & Associates for all of three days when he decided that he damn well deserved some time off. So he spitballed a few ideas that presumably included hard-to-acquire ingredients like anthrax spores and trucks full of fertilizer, before settling on a much simpler scheme: in repeated attempts to get the office to close, he sent creepily specific threats to his co-workers via text messages. Messages like this:

Hello Tom. I know you are wondering who this is, but we will get to that later. I've watched you for the past 6 months. Where you work, which route you take home, where you grocery shop, where you go for drinks, where that pretty little girlfriend of yours works; need I go on? What do I want you may be wondering? I want you and the rest of your staff to evacuate the building. Failure to do so will harm not only your pretty soon to be wife, but everyone who works for you. I have planted and will detonate 18 C4 explosives in exactly 30 minutes. Take this as a joke, and your staff's lives will be in your hands.

Yes, as if being one of those annoying people who sends messages so long that they get split up into like 10 texts wasn't bad enough, Bea was also certifiably fucking batshit insane. But it gets better -- to throw off suspicion, he also texted threats to himself ("You better not show up today or ack Henry will pay.") and then Tyler Durdened responses from his model employee personality ("You are not going to stop me from working and performing. Fuck off."). And, best of all (in an alternate universe where "best of all" means "oh holy hot goddamn, that's the worst thing I've ever read"), Bea even went so far as to text his colleagues photos of his own dead brother resting in a casket at his funeral. Just so he would have an excuse to stay home, where he'd be safe from the fictional madman.

Authorities traced the source of the messages to Bea's home, where they found precisely zero explosives but did find several people's identities that Bea had stolen from Jack Henry & Associates, because of course he had. To Bea's credit, his plan worked: he did ultimately end up getting out of work ... unless ... hey, do they still make inmates manufacture license plates? Oh, good, they do.

3 Kids Keep Pretending to Get Kidnapped to Avoid School

At the risk of sounding like a bunch of old farts, whatever happened to the good old days, when playing hooky from school meant faking a tummy ache or sticking a thermometer in the microwave in an attempt to convince your mom you had scarlet fever? (Don't try that one at home, kids.) Young people these days have taken the age-old tradition of skipping school and cranked it up to 11 on the loon-o-meter, as evidenced by the fact that faking their own kidnappings is apparently now a thing.

Back in 2012, an 11-year-old boy in Mumbai, India, had an upcoming English exam that ranked somewhere below "the bus to school" on the scale of things he did not want to take. His solution? Influenced by watching cop shows on TV, he called his parents from a public phone and informed them that he'd been abducted by four men in a white van, because everyone knows that four dudes riding around in a van can only be either stoners or creeps. The boy was later found by police wandering the streets while being conspicuously unkidnapped, and he quickly caved to the fact that he'd made the whole thing up. He wasn't charged because, you know, he was 11, but he did have to take the exam -- seemingly a punishment worse than prison.

Months later and an ocean away (in Brazil), 22-year-old college student Susan Paola Fadel Correia had a similar conundrum: on the one hand, she had a year-end university project due; on the other, she had all these friends that really needed hanging out with. So she skipped out on the project, then later claimed that three men had abducted her, tied her up for 24 hours, then released her, because gangs of men who kidnap and bind 22-year-old college girls generally have a complete change of heart about a day later.

We're not done yet. In 2013 another college student -- this time closer to home in Lilburn, Georgia -- was failing English (what is it with these kids and English?). Rather than telling his parents about it, 19-year-old Aftab Aslam went the simpler route: he bought a cheap prepaid cellphone and texted them from it, claiming to be a "criminal gang" that had kidnapped their son, and warning them not to call the police. Of course, they called the police. The police, of course, called the FBI. The FBI, of course, launched an eight-day manhunt, during which Aslam camped out in a freaking field like someone out of a Jon Krakauer book. When it started raining, he gave up and returned to his parents' home, where authorities promptly charged him with "falsely reporting a crime, making false statements, tampering with evidence, and making terroristic threats." We're guessing that looks a little bit worse on your permanent record than an F in English.

Where the hell are kids getting this stuff? Don't they have any positive adult influences in their lives, for Christ's sake? Well, about that ...

2 A Teacher Claimed He Had Just Vehicular-Manslaughtered a Child

When someone chooses teaching as a profession, it's generally a safe bet that they value the lives of children, maybe even more so than the average person does. That's why it comes as such a shock that Derek McGlone, a "respected" music teacher in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, would call in "sick" by lying about horribly killing one.

McGlone was no stranger to over-the-top excuses. He once claimed to have been buried in the ash cloud from a volcanic eruption in Iceland while he was at his home in Glasgow.

McGlone also had an obvious lack of respect for his co-workers -- he was known for going on "drunken rants" on Facebook and calling his colleagues "bitches." And while we've all called our Facebook friends things that would make our mothers blush, it's a sure bet that, unless you're an outright sociopath, there is literally no chance whatsoever that you've done what McGlone did next.

Here, let's try to follow along with his thought process: McGlone gets up one morning. He doesn't feel like going to work, possibly due to too much drunken Facebooking last night, whatever. He picks up the phone, deciding on his excuse as he dials the school's number. (Sore throat? Migraine?) The phone rings; the school administrator picks up. What should he say?

So he claimed he'd just run over a young girl with his car. And rather than stopping there and maybe, you know, rethinking his life choices a bit, McGlone decided that fuck it, he'd go whole hog -- to really make the horribleness of the fictional experience sink in, he described in vivid detail the way he'd felt the girl's bones crunching beneath the tires as he (presumably slowly, so very slowly) rolled over her. Obviously, a person having just gone through such a traumatic and/or titillating experience could not be expected to report to work.

Since a girl being killed by a car is a relatively simple event to verify, McGlone's tale quickly unraveled and, brought before a disciplinary panel, he was given "a 12-month reprimand against his name on the teaching register," which is possibly a polite Scottish phrase meaning "a very special award in the shape of a giant dick."

1 A Guy Took a Bullet to Get out of His Job at Walmart

While you could inarguably say that everyone we've told you about so far experienced moments of undeniable, categorical insanity, you could also say that they are posers who lack a true dedication to their quest to shirk their responsibilities. If you were to say that about Daniel Kuch of Pasco, Washington, on the other hand, he would quite possibly kick your ass, or maybe rip your throat clean out with his teeth.

Now, we feel it's necessary to qualify what we're about to tell you by first telling you that Kuch worked at Walmart. That fact alone could perhaps completely negate the insanity of the story because, ugh, fucking Walmart, you know? But we're going to tell it anyway for the specific reason that, holy shit, the guy talked a friend into shooting him so he could get out of going to work. Shooting him with a gun. A gun that shoots bullets. (And that was possibly purchased at Walmart, we're not sure.)

It all began when Kuch (which we would make a point to pronounce as "cooch" if we weren't deathly afraid of the man, as you should be too) found out that he was due for a drug test at work. For reasons that aren't entirely clear (maybe he had a thing about peeing into cups?), Kuch did not wish to take this drug test. So he called up his good friend, Kurtis Johnson. After what must have been an alarmingly infinitesimal amount of convincing (because any amount of convincing would be alarmingly infinitesimal in this situation), Johnson shot Kuch in the shoulder, and then proceeded to dump the gun in a river. Then another acquaintance, Oleg Barbarosh, stepped in to drive the now-bleeding Kuch to the hospital and report that he was the victim of a drive-by, because apparently Kuch prefers to do his cardio in gang territory.

It's suddenly becoming much clearer why Kuch was so averse to taking that drug test.

It took authorities an amount of time that can only be measured in Planck units to figure out what was really going on and, as you might expect, Kuch and Barbarosh were brought up on charges of false reporting, while Johnson got slapped in the face by a pretty little assault charge. It's also basically a given that Kuch no longer has to worry about going to his job at Walmart. Still, on some crazy-ass level, you've got to admire his unyielding commitment (to avoiding commitment by any means necessary).

Kevin Phelan is an entertainment reporter in New York's Lower Hudson Valley. He totally didn't write this at work. If enough people follow his Twitter, he might actually start using it. You can book his face here.

For more people who are total idiots, check out 6 People Who Died In Order To Prove A (Retarded) Point and The 7 Most Impressively Lazy Employees of All-Time.

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