UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home Police in the United Kingdom appear to be taking a cue from Homer Simpson's playbook, with officers in multiple departments accused of "key jamming" to make it look like they were working from home when they likely weren't. While there was no mention in reports from Greater Manchester Police or the Durham Constabulary …
One wonders what the police were expecting their detectives to be doing at home anyway. Obviously not Gathering Evidence, or Reading Forensic Reports, or Interviewing Witnesses. Writing reports? In that case, were those reports delivered on time?
If anyone ever suspected that police forces have degenerated into bureaucracies obsessed with desk work and remote surveillance, rather than basic community policing, this does nothing to dispel those suspicions.
I'll add that in the US insurance industry in the late 20th century, offsite activities such as damage inspection and evaluation, tended to become "drinking beer on the porch while writing entirely fictitious reports". The move to digital photos with location info from GPS at least took care of that form of skiving.
Actually I get that on my little Linux Mint machine (HP 14s-dq0034na Laptop ) occasionally. A key autorepeats for no reason I can see, not always the same key either. Its either a reboot of figure out which key (easy sometines) and press it again to fix it.
I started typing in the 1960s - On a good day, I can use 2 fingers (and a thumb for the space bar) on the right hand, with an occasional second finger on the left. I sometimes worked with police officers just as they were installing computers - the average that I saw was an index finger with a 1-2 second gap between keys - They, like me, had started with a typewriter.
A typewriter was originally the person who operated the machine. As clerical work was usually done by men, and the machines were "technical" the majority of users were male. Many more women were employed in offices during WW1 to replace the absent men, so by the 1920's, typewriting was often considered "women's work". The (female) clerical staff that I worked with considered my efforts "hysterically funny/poor".
I suspect that somebody could set up a Raspberry Pi Zero loaded up with typical police reports, connect its serial port to the PC, have a couple of python scrips randomly choosing sentences, add a few errors and random delays between letters, with a number of gaps of a few minutes...
Somehow, I think a person with that much initiative and technical knowledge ought to be looking for different employment.
But it did strike me to wonder - one of the perks of some public sector jobs is a fairly early retirement age with an inflation proofed pension. Do the fired personnel get to keep this, or are their contributions refunded, on the grounds they didn't do the work they were paid for?
> I often come back to find pages and pages of a single letter in the document I was working on.
See Brian Bilston's poem ‘On ‘;..p’[[[[[[[[[[[[[;’;////////////////////////3,’ (sorry that the link is to facetwit): https://www.facebook.com/BrianBilston/posts/1094388909395490/
Got a message saying they'd monitored traffic and logins from my PC and it seemed like I hadn't been doing any work.
Pointed out they were looking at my laptop's IP address or ID - not my actual home PC or server.
And that some stuff I did with my User logon and other things I did with my Domain Admin logon.
Silence ensued!
>Thubron was only working at his computer about half the time during his working hours in the period in question.
So he was working around half the time and mucking around on the computer half the time?
Really, keylogging and other other spying is always unacceptable and if there's real work, it's not that hard to check that the work has been done at the end of each day.
But instead, all of the department gets to look busy at the station.
Back in the day, I wrote a few lines of C for Windows. The application was called "keepalive.exe".
It was quite small.
Once it was running it moved the cursor around a bit then (programatically) hit a key.....maybe once every five minutes.
No need to fiddle with jamming keys......Charles Petzold provided some of the solution.
No, but a keylogger would still register a suspicious key press pattern.
I wonder why the superior officers of the individuals concerned aren't (AFAICS) being held to account? I'm not worried if people WFH aren't tapping away every second of their working day - obviously that's a definition of "work" for Plod, but I'd rather that the police were effective in what they do. I also wonder if they've looked at the keylogs for office computers, especially the chief constable? I want ALL of his time accounted for, and there's three valid categories - in a properly minuted meeting, on the shitter, typing furiously into his computer.
Every now and then it sends out a stream of F1s, and a myriad of help pages start opening up on the screen.
The PC's fan (that's the thing inside the case, not a friend of Plod) starts working overtime, and eventually something breaks and it all stops working.
More electronic waste :(
is why people put up with this invasive keylogging in the first place. Either a person produces the output required by their job, or they don't. The amount of time spent on presenteeism should therefore be irrelevant.
If I'm contracted to be paid X to do Y in a certain time period, and I do Y to the satisfaction of my employers, then I say it's nobody's business how much time it took me to do it. But then again, I am self-employed, so maybe I just have an unusually rational view of the nature of labour. I simply wouldn't agree to be monitored in this way.
