A hustler pays attention and sees the Corona era as just another opportunity to utilize while people are off balance and make themselves weak and confused with pointless moping about the organic world. Take ’em for a ride and grab free money to feed your family.

March job posting descriptions started changing. Where previous IT jobs required 100% office cohabitation, they were now listed as “Temporary telecommuting due to COVID-19”. One of the great things about teleworking is you can hold many jobs at once and get paid for all of them, no matter how inept you are.

Upon seeing the great possibilities, I immediately started stacking several telecommuting jobs in addition to my actual job.

Week 1 is onboarding. You can claim mysterious network outages, configuration problems, and other blockages. Summon Zeno and progress halfway closer to our goal, but never done. Any installations you have to do yourself should skip some steps or reverse essential order to scramble your functionality. Contact sysadmins late in the evening. This makes it look like you are working long hours and lets you say to management the next day that you sent the request to sysadmins “yesterday” – buying you more time to collect income from your new employer.

Week 2 will get you in touch with whatever project team you are to be working with. Here you act enthused and eager to see how they do things and participate. You might start claiming tasks, but realistically you aren’t going to do anything or turn it in. Just stick and move through the week.

Week 3 is when grandma dies. You spent every summer with her growing up. You let your management know late Monday that it has happened and that you’ll have to meet with family for a day or so soon. Tuesday you let them know that you’ll be out at least Wednesday, but also take off Thursday just to create a gap. Friday you come back to earn money and no one will press you hard. Grandma has bought you several days to reboot.

Week 4 continues the slacking of Week 2, talking to people and looking into details, but never doing anything effective. You are just looking to run out the clock this week, as soon expectations are going to catch up to you.

Week 5 is when you drag your feet and work towards the exit. You can let your boss or HR know that this whole quarantine thing has been really hard on your mental health and you haven’t clicked with the team yet. They might accept your resignation or let you filibuster for another few more weeks.

You can do this with several jobs simultaneously if you are organized and enjoy juggling.