So I saw this story about how police officers in Miami were busted for faking work.

From CBS News:

The Miami Dade Police Department has fired a sergeant and two officers and suspended three others without pay in what is considered one of the worst incidents of delinquency in the department’s history, CBS Miami reports.

The accusations vary against each officer, but they include: failing to respond to emergency calls, pretending to be on calls when they weren’t and falsifying police records, according to the station.

Yeah, that’s right—in a job where there are myriad ways to be watched, from duty reports and response records to surveillance video and eyewitness accounts, those tasked with policing others thought they could ignore emergency and crime calls to sit around drinking coffee (and eat donuts, amiright?!), run personal errands, hook up with girlfriends and generally avoid their professional responsibilities.

Now look, when it comes to goofing off at work, I think very few of us are willing to throw rocks from the confines of our glass cubicles. Anyone who has ever collected a paycheck has undoubtedly had a few minutes here and there of doing things that were not exactly “work-related” while on the clock. The actions of these officers, however, seems particularly egregious—even on my worst day, I never ignored an emergency call of a 5-year-old child in medical distress.

Then again, given my skill set and general lack of any useful abilities, I’ve generally been employed at jobs where not being completely focused on the task at hand has not caused any undue injury or hardship. But there are definitely certain professions out there that demand constant attention and care while working, say like surgeon, airline pilot, hostage negotiator or roller derby queen.

But yeah, I’ve definitely *had* me some gigs (not any more, OF COURSE) where there was copious amounts of “extracurricular” activities:

• While working my way through college, I landed a between-classes job at the SCSU student center, which meant I occasionally pulled duty in the game room. Now if there was ever a job where “play” is okay during business hours, this was it—we were allowed to shoot pool for free while we manned the desk, which involved charging others for pool, giving out quarters for video games and keeping track of ping pong balls. Let’s just say by the time I graduated, I was a fairly decent (although not great) billiards player.

I also would say that occasionally looking the other way when it was time for a comely young coed to pay—which would also somehow make the usage counter go to zero (oh dang) and result in no charge—in hopes of making a new “friend,” could be termed a lapse of focus while on the job, although I would say I was completely focused. Just not on work.

Speaking of making friends: I met one of my best friends, Big Balls Bob, while playing pool—we were both rocking out to “Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett while at tables across from each other. We started chatting and well, the rest (including meeting my wife) is history (for another day).

• One of my other pay-for-college jobs was working the stock room at Sears in Orange, and in a big warehouse without a lot of supervision, there was plenty of mischief for myself and a few of my buddies (Greg and Gary, in particular) to get into. One of our favorite unsanctioned activities was staging wrestling matches involving the 20-foot-high rack where they stored rugs. In front of it was usually a cushy stack of rolled rugs and rug pads, so dramatically climbing to the top of the rack and launching ourselves down on top of each others, à la Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, was something we’d do on a regular basis. How we never broke our fool necks doing this, I don’t know. But it was fun.

We also tried our hands at “the stock boy Olympics,” which involved “events” like seeing how fast we could use a sticker gun, how quickly we could handtruck a refrigerator across the loading dock and how far we could throw pieces of already-broken merchandise.

I recall one guy I worked with actually took furniture cushions and old blankets and made himself a nap nest of sorts up on top of one rack in the far back of the warehouse. You’d never find him unless you had a reason to be 25 feet up in the air in the area where the ceiling fans were stored. Now that I think of it, he actually may still be there 25 years later, slumbering away like Rip van Winkle.

I also remember we had one manager by the name of Marty who always tried to bust us while we were screwing around. (I say “bust us”; he may have gone with “make us do the work for which we were getting paid.” Semantics.) He used to have a big ring of noisy keys on his belt, so we usually heard him coming, except once when I saw him holding them and quietly stalking a pair of my co-workers who were shooting the breeze; he eventually sprung on them like a lion pouncing on hapless antelopes.

From then on, we goofed off with one eye open, so to speak.

• Before I start writing about my time working at ShopRite during the 1980s, I should probably ask about the statute of limitations on petty larceny …

Okay, let’s put it this way … I’m not saying *I* ever did this, but let’s say my friend who worked there—let’s call him “Ray”—remembers an occasion or two while working an unsupervised overnight shift during the Can Can sale that things got a little, shall we say, lax, particularly in relation to the unpaid procurement of grocery items for personal consumption. You know, like at around 3 a.m. when a bunch of hardworking college students could get hungry and decide that if they made a few sandwiches from the deli, took a few bags of chips, maybe a six-pack (or two) of beer and enjoyed an extended lunch break, it probably wouldn’t hurt anyone other than the rich millionaire owners who had gotten rich by underpaying us—er, them—in the first place, right? He’s not saying he’s proud of it, he’s just saying it might’ve happened.

He also may recall another night during the overnight shift where he started joking around with his buddy John who was stocking shelves in the next aisle over. For reasons that made sense then, they might’ve started blindly launching merchandise over the top of the racks in an effort to hit each other, an activity that ended badly when John chucked a plastic bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup that exploded upon impact—who in the name of Aunt Jemima knew a plastic bottle could shatter like that?—resulting in a horribly sticky mess that they had to scramble to try and clean up before the night supervisor caught them.

He would also say that cleaning up maple syrup is difficult under the best of circumstances, and attempting to do so quickly and quietly in an empty store at night, adds another degree of difficulty. Actually, he would say, if he had actually just had been working rather than goofing off, it would’ve been much easier.

But where’s the fun in that?