People who have jobs with close to zero workload, how did you get into the job and what's your story? (find mine in comments)

A couple of years ago a former classmate’s dad overheard me explaining a simple office macro to a friend. Back then, office macros and simple batch scripts were the most "special" thing I could do with computers and I wasn’t even interested in IT at all.

Anyway, I still don’t know why but the father walked up to me and asked me if I wanted a job. I didn’t really have a job at this point in time so I told him I was interested. He didn’t know anything about me and invited me to an "interview" which basically was a meeting to sign a $40’000 contract for administrating servers. Accidentally installing some server version of Windows was the closest I ever got to a "server" but I was really depressed back then so I didn’t care about getting called out on not knowing anything within the first week.

Monday morning, the guy whose job I took over was showing me around, giving me all the credentials and even showed me some things in the system that apparently were different to other versions of Linux (no idea). I understood about 5% of the terms he mentioned and I literally got a stiff neck by nodding to his explanations for about 4 hours til lunch break. 3 spoons of soup was best I could do, I felt sick regretting pulling this off and I just wanted to go home.

Next day, it was all on me. It’s a company with about 5000 employees, none of which I’ve known before so I just rushed into my little office on the first day of work. I did not know what to do. I had no idea what to do and I had no idea how to act like I knew what to do.

I remembered the "apt-get" command (to install something) in the linux shell, so, as a security measure, the first thing I did was logging into one of the computers there, running a script that was constantly installing/uninstalling the same application. Kinda looked a bit like the matrix which made me feel safe as other people wouldn’t understand what’s going on there. I was staring at the screen for the whole day as I was expecting people to come into my room.

Fast forward 4 years: I have NEVER been asked to do anything here, I am still getting the same $40’000 I agreed on, I am still running the same script all day and I still don’t know much about computers. During my first months, I started reading books about linux but after not having ANY work-related conversation in this office, I figured out I should just spend my time playing video games and watching movies. The department that I originally got assigned to kinda closed down/moved but I have never gotten any information letter on that - it feels like my name is a ghost in some management database that someone has forgotten to delete/check on.

The thing that bothers me the most is that my future in this company is so uncertain. The company itself will never close down but if anyone ever asked me what I am working on (or even worse: ask me to do something for him) the cover that I don’t have would blow. I also find it amazing how much of a good job the person before must’ve done that these servers need zero maintenance - I am so out of touch with that topic that I wouldn’t even know if someone was actually servicing the servers (which kinda would be my job) and I don’t know what these servers are actually doing, either. They might be online and idling 24/7, they might be under heavy load all the time - I have no idea; I will just pray that none of them ever break down or, if they do, don’t ever get noticed by anyone but me.

I am also starting to take days off as it doesn’t really make sense to stay in office all day. Maybe I should put a "back in one hour" sign on the group and install a little motion-detecting camera so I get notified if someone would ever get into my office but now after all these years, it probably doesn’t even matter anymore.

So yeah, that’s my zero workload $40’000 job.

/r/AskReddit Thread