Manas Chakravarty: How to avoid work

WATCHWORD

Vive La France. French power company Electricite De France (EDF) has decided not to initiate disciplinary action against Corinne Maier, an employee who made it to the bestseller lists with her book Bonjour Paresse, or Hello Laziness, a manual on how to avoid work. Subtitled "The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible in the Workplace" Ms Maier's book had raised her employer's hackles, and she was called for a disciplinary hearing last month. Among the charges was Ms Maier's disconcerting habit of reading a newspaper during meetings.

Corinne's spirited response to the threat was to take her annual holiday. Faced with the prospect of her case turning into a cause celebre, EDF has bowed to the inevitable and dropped the charges.

That must have been a bitter pill for EDF to swallow, since the book contains chapters with headings like "Business Culture""My Arse", and "The Morons who are sitting next to you". But for many of us, her tips could come in very handy.

The commandments listed in the book, for instance, include this gem: "You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you.

So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you're untouchable when the next restructuring comes around." Or this sound advice, "Make a beeline for the most useless positions, (research, strategy and business development), where it is impossible to assess your 'contribution to the wealth of the firm'."

In England too, authors are dishing out advice on "How to be Idle", which is the title of the new book by Tom Hodgkinson, the editor of a magazine called, appropriately enough, "The Idler".

Among other things, this book tells you how to schedule your day. At 10 am, for instance, you should be sleeping, 12 noon should see you nursing your hangover, while some "desultory sex" at 1 am seems to be good for the soul.

I suspect, however, that these manuals on idleness would be rather redundant in this country. During my heyday in a public sector bank, for instance, we heard this oft-told story about a Titan among Idlers. He was in charge of replying to all telegrams at the bank's foreign exchange branch, while the person next to him replied to all the letters.

In those days, most of the forex advice from foreign banks was sent by telegram, so it was a mystery how the guy in charge of telegrams could spend the day chatting with friends or solving crossword puzzles.

The mystery deepened when it was found that the person next to him was slogging away all day, with his desk buried in letters. On investigation, it was found that the master-idler had one stock reply to all incoming telegrams, "Message mutilated. Please send details by letter." The letter, when it came, went to the guy next to him.

While that story may have a touch of the apocryphal, what follows is nothing but the truth. We were merrily whiling away the afternoon in the bank canteen, discussing football, when the conversation turned to Maradona, and how he had insured his legs for an awesome amount.

That led a friend of mine to suggest thoughtfully that we too should insure our legs. "Why, you think you're Maradona?" we laughed. "Not at all," replied the wise one, "but have you guys realised that we've been getting our salaries all these years by sitting and shaking our legs? What if something happens to our legs so that we can't shake them? Why should they pay us then?" I met up with this friend recently at the bank's head office in Mumbai, and he proudly informed me that he was on his 5,473rd computer card game in the office.

It's not only in the public sector that we learnt the virtues of idleness. When I used to sell offshore credit for a finance company, I was sometimes lucky enough to meet my monthly sales target early.

I then had to spend the rest of the month seeing all the movies in town, because if I exceeded the target they would raise the budget for the next month. Ms Maier would have approved.

She would also have been awed by the clerk who wanted the bank to open a branch near his house, so that he needn't come late to office. Or by the lady who, when I asked her to type more than her daily quota of four letters, asked me whether I realised her maid hadn't come in to work that day, and she would have to do the housework.

Tom and Corinne should have come here before writing their slacker guidebooks. We could have given them plenty of tips.

manas@business-standard.com