5 People Who Elevated Laziness To An Art Form
We're so lazy that we'd outsource going to the bathroom if we could, but until science figures that one out, we're stuck with this Mountain Dew bottle. That's pretty lazy, but while we like to think we're artistes in the field of blowing stuff off, there are some true elite masters out there who put our own skills to shame. Like ...
A Government Employee Blew Off Work For Six Years, And Nobody Noticed
Joaquin Garcia, a Spanish civil servant tasked with supervising a wastewater treatment plant, was fined one year's salary ($30,000) after officials noticed that he hadn't showed up to work for "at least six years." The water company thought local authorities were supervising him, and local authorities thought the water company was supervising him, so no one noticed that he wasn't showing up at all until, ironically, he became eligible to receive a plaque for his 20 years of civil service.
People close to Garcia claimed that he arrived at the plant and found "no work to do there," but didn't want to give up a chance to provide for his family, so he never said anything. Given that the plant didn't explode and no one noticed he was gone for six years, he was probably right? Spanish newspapers dubbed Garcia "el funcionario fantasma" -- "the phantom official" -- which feels like way too badass of a moniker for a dude who did nothing but sleep in a bunch.
An Electrician Built A Faraday Cage Around His GPS So He Wouldn't Get Caught Golfing
Tom Colella, an electrician in Perth, Australia, lost his job after he got busted playing golf during work hours. Not once, not a couple times, but "at least 140 times over the last two years," according to an anonymous letter to his firm. But that's merely the beginning of this saga. Skipping work to play golf? Novice laziness. Doing it 140 times in two years? Intermediate laziness. But turning a packet of cheese puffs into a foil Faraday cage to block the signal on your work GPS so you can't be tracked to the golf course?
Australia's Fair Work Commission formed a tribunal to investigate Colella's alleged absences, and found that he was using an empty foil packet of Twisties to block the GPS signal of his PDA whenever he felt like sneaking away. Which was constantly. An official at the tribunal ruled, "I can find no plausible explanation why Mr. Colella would create a Faraday cage around his PDA, except to obstruct the GPS collecting capacity of the device." Presumably, "and because he's a magnificently lazy son of a bitch" was omitted from the transcript. Colella now reportedly works as an Uber driver -- the perfect Twilight Zone kind of ironic punishment for someone who went through great lengths to thwart a GPS.
A Waffle House Employee Sleeps Through A Customer Coming In, Cooking A Meal For Himself, And Leaving
Alex Bowen showed up slightly intoxicated to a South Carolina Waffle House in the middle of the night, which is the only way to do it. But he waited for ten minutes at the register, and nobody showed up. After investigating, he came across a lone employee asleep in a corner booth. And not simple "accidentally napping at work" asleep, but full on dead to the world coma sleeping. The employee slept even as Alex gave up on waking them, went back into the kitchen, and made the food for himself.
Bowen heated up the grill, cooked himself a Texas bacon cheesesteak melt with extra pickles, documented the whole thing with Facebook photos, then cleaned the grill and left, leaving the employee undisturbed.
He then returned the next day to leave the restaurant $5, because he's a damn gentleman. The comatose employee kept their job, but was suspended for a week, during which time they presumably slept.
A Postal Worker Hoarded 17,000 Pieces Of Undelivered Mail
Brooklyn mail carrier Aleksey Germash was in a heap of trouble when investigators found 10,000 pieces of undelivered mail stuffed into blue post office bags crammed inside his Nissan Pathfinder. They also discovered 6,000 undelivered items in his home and another 1,000 in his work locker, with one piece postmarked as far back as 2005.
Germash claimed he kept the mail because he was overwhelmed by the sheer insurmountable task of delivering it, which was the only part of his job, but added that he "made sure to deliver the important mail." Yep, the guy who drove around for 13 years with giant sacks of old mail in every nook and cranny of his life definitely took the time and effort to painstakingly sort your letters by importance.
A JetBlue Worker Fell Asleep In A Cargo Bin In New York, Then Woke Up In Boston
Tarmac workers at Boston's Logan Airport were surprised to see Sidney Nurse, a 21-year-old JetBlue employee, emerge from the plane's cargo hold after it landed. JetBlue is cheap, but they're not that cheap. Turns out Nurse was loading bags into the plane at New York's JFK Airport when he crawled into the pressurized luggage compartment, fell asleep, and woke up in Boston after a 200-mile aerial nap.
You may be asking yourself a few questions, like, "How do you fall asleep in the middle of loading bags?" "Was he just lying on a huge pile of peoples' bags?" "How did the sound of literal jet engines going off not wake him up?" "Did the other baggage loaders not see him?"
But Massachusetts State Police spokesman David Procopio issued a statement that cleared up everything: "Even after talking to him, we were a little uncertain as to how it happened." So there you go.
This wasn't even a unique case. In 2005, a baggage handler for Spirit Airways fell asleep in the luggage compartment and woke up in Detroit. Exactly how comfy is an airplane baggage compartment? Can we pay extra to sleep down there next time?
What's laziness without a good pillow? Try one of these from Purple.
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For more, check out Two Year Faked Coma: 6 People That Worked Hard At Being Lazy and The 7 Most Impressively Lazy Employees Of All-Time.
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