What Does One Do with Co-workers Who Won’t Work?

A frustrated government employee writes,

Ones who ignore piles of work to be done, or make certain that they take a very large pile and go through it as s-l-o-w-l-y as possible while they dawdle, stare into space, and surf the internet?  What can one do when they ignore hints, and when your supervisor will not fire them because Civil Service rules are not based on competency?  What are the options available, Tyler?

Coincidentally, I also got the following question, presumably from someone else:

Dear Tyler, I found an almost-perfect job. My boss doesn’t seem to care how much work I get done and I practically can’t be fired, so I have lots of slack to follow my inclination to dream or browse lolcats. My one problem is that one of my co-workers is always watching me and paying attention to what I do or don’t do. It’s cramping my style. What can I do about this busybody?

We honor the search for slack here, so I would generally be inclined to sympathize with the second questioner. But the honorable way to achieve slack is to be so good at what you do that you can do your fair share with time to spare. Dumping extra work on your co-workers because you’re disinclined to do it, isn’t cool. You accumulate karmic burden, and will have to come back as something extra industrious, like a termite, to make up for it.

In a case such as this, the busy co-worker is probably perfectly justified in lying the slacker down in their mind-transfer machine and swapping their brain for a duplicate of the brain of some hard-working person. It’s interesting to note that there actually is no law against doing this; I checked. It is, however, illegal to kidnap and drug someone to get them onto the slab, so you have to fool them. Given the mindset, telling them it’s a prototype virtual-reality martial arts game that they get to test in advance of its public release, would probably do the trick. Just make sure they don’t blog about it beforehand.

To deal with a lazy co-worker, trick them into letting you replace their brain with something better.