In this guide, I will explain how you can be a slacker at Dale and Dawson and still look like you are working in your work environment.
Slacker Guide Dale and Dawson Stationery Supplies
Slacking is more than just goofing off. Crippling an office is a unique art. The regular employees typically outnumber you, so it’s rare to beat them by simply out-tasking them. It’s going to require impeding Specialists, framing the innocent, and bamboozling the Manager if you want to eek out a victory.
Slackers are usually 30% of the workforce, and you can’t always tell who your fellow slackers are. Play it smart!
What to look out for:
- The manager’s keys – On a hook in the manager’s office. Get there first! When they’re in your hand, you can lock and unlock doors at your will, but don’t get caught with them.
- Janitors – Can lock and unlock doors. Easy to blame them for doors you locked.
- Other, incompetent slackers – Sacrificing them, loudly, can lend you credibility.
- Task-critical items – Alone in the copy room and something just got printed? Shred it! Wasted time is a good time.
- Bins – While one person with a fire extinguisher can fix a burning bin, it’s more common to see 6 employees running in circles screaming “FIRE!! FIRE!!”. A great distraction play.
Establishing your Cover
Sometimes, going about your tasks quietly can be just as suspicious as a blatant slacker, especially if all the other slackers are a quiet as you. You can still interact with things the same way Specialists can, so it might be a good idea to fake tasks so you’re ‘cleared’ by other Specialists and the Manager. Some ideas on how to do that are below.
- Make your desktop busy – Emails, inventory, documents – having some or all of these open mean that, at a glance, you look like a very busy fellow. In the same vein, don’t leave Snake or Minesweeper open, even if they’re minimised. Other employees might see it, and that might be the best intel they have that round.
- Fake tasks, loudly and publicly – Some of the best fake tasks for establishing your cover are ones that require the Manager’s signature. You get undivided face-time with them and establish yourself as someone doing tasks directly.
- Cover slacker tasks with fake ones – Going to pet the cats? Bring some cat food with you. If you’re about to get caught, just do the fake task instead of your real one.
- Have a fake task list in mind – In meetings or around the office, you might get interrogated on what tasks you’ve done. If you fumble or refuse to answer, you might get pegged as a Slacker. Have a fake list in mind, and don’t sweat it if you can’t think of three Specialist tasks – Specialists get Slacker tasks too.
- Do some slacker tasks publicly – A guy with no slacker tasks is sometimes more suspicious than a guy who has two. If it’s a small lobby and you see each other often, it can pay to tell that guy you’re jelly-ing his stapler in advance.
The Manager Bamboozle
Managers are the number one threat to your slacking potential. They have very limited tasks, so the majority of their time is spent prowling the office looking for employees not doing work or sabotaging. The easiest way to get away with slacking off is making sure the Manager is so preoccupied that they don’t even know where you are. Here’s some general tips.
- Choose infection targets wisely – You can only disable one PC with the floppy disc, so have an idea of who is actually a hard worker and prioritise them. The less work done, the better.
- Hide important items – It takes up more time and people to put out a fire if nobody knows where the fire extinguishers have gone. Covertly take them and put them out of the way – behind a corner office, in the bathroom, the warehouse – somewhere with limited visibility and foot traffic.
- Office drama – Printing an email about how the boss touched you inappropriately in the break room will not move the task bar, but it will make other employees scramble to learn what happened. This works even better if you can convince people someone else wrote it.
- The keys – The manager’s keys are a powerful item, opening doors that the manager would prefer to stay closed. Use them to lock doors that get a LOT of foot traffic (e.g. between offices) and the manager will have to spend most of their time unlocking them.
- Self-report – Reporting something is amiss (even if you made it that way yourself) can be a decent way to establish your cover and/or start a screaming match for the Manager’s attention. More wasted time is good news for you.
These tips used in combination will leave the Manager scrambling to get the office back to normal, and eating up a lot of the time they were going to use collecting evidence and catching people out. When comes to meeting time, they’ll have no idea who to fire – that’s when you step in with an accusation no one can disprove.
The Task Flick
Some of your tasks – the sabotage ones, marked in grey – are specific to Slackers, so it’s indefensible if you get caught doing them. They are also, however, quick to execute and sometimes delayed action (a short time passes before anyone can see what happened). Turning off the servers and setting fire to bins can be done very quickly and grant you time to get out of the general area, which is where the Task Flick is useful.
Specific actions always show up in the same place on the radial wheel, so it’d be useful to learn which segment you’re aiming for before you’ve even seen it. To any passerby, it looks like you’re simply wandering the corridor, turning to the side for a split second. Then, once everyone crowds in to fix the problem, you can either keep walking off, unsuspected, or be the first one to fix them problem, which might lend you some credit. Getting to an inconspicuous spot or being the first to the fire extinguisher may require some map knowledge, so play a few games and memorise what items are where.
Surviving the Meeting
So, a meeting has been called, and it’s likely someone’s about to get fired. Should you play loud, accusing another employee of the stuff you’ve been up to? Or should you keep quiet and hope you’ve gone under the radar? It’ll depend on a few things.
One good indicator of how confident a Manager is in an accusation is how much time they have left. On regular rules, the Manager has eight minutes to fire someone before he gets fired himself. So, if a meeting is called with a few minutes left, there’s a good chance that the Manager has seen or heard something and is ready to point fingers. If there’s 20 seconds to spare, this might not be a meeting called based on any evidence, the manager just doesn’t want to get the boot.
Left: A manager with a specific accusation. Right: A fool with nothing to lose.
- Play humble – don’t come out of the gate with strong accusations unless you’ve got most of the office behind you. Pointing the finger squarely at someone and being wrong means you’re the top target next round.
- Use your cover – keep in mind the tasks that you’ve been pretending to do and remind people who were nearby.
- Caught slacking? – remind employees that slacker tasks are assigned to everybody. By default, 1/3 of employee tasks are slacking off, and an unlucky Specialist might end up with 3 Slacker tasks.
Playing the Numbers
Refers to games that have Janitors on.
The game allows for as many terminations as there are employees, Slacker or otherwise. But, truly removing people from an office takes more than one ternimation. Once an employee is fired, they might become a Janitor instead. They can lock doors at will, have only one task, and need to be fired a second time to have zero impact on the game. Getting Managers to fire Janitors instead of employees is a great idea. It’ll whittle down the amount of terminations, and you may end up in a situation where there are more Slackers than there are terminations, which means a default Slacker win if you’re not beaten on tasks.
Follow these steps and you have a great chance of seeing your office branch collapse under the weight of it’s own inefficiency. Remember – you’ve been working hard, the manager sucks, and that drawing of a wee wee was definitely done by someone else.
