Wells Fargo fired a dozen people accused of faking keyboard strokes

The pandemic may have released us from the tyranny of the five-day-a-week office schedule. But the grip of America’s busy-work culture is proving harder to shake.

The pandemic may have released us from the tyranny of the five-day-a-week office schedule. But the grip of America’s busy-work culture is proving harder to shake. See here: Wells Fargo this week disclosed that it had fired more than a dozen employees for “simulation of keyboard activity,” Bloomberg reported, citing filings to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. In other words, they were faking work, perhaps with the kind of mouse jiggler that you can buy online for $20. Those devices — which keep your screen active and move your cursor in convincingly random ways — took off during the early days of the pandemic. With employees no longer huddled together under fluorescent lighting, eating sad desk salads, bosses suddenly had to wonder whether their teams were actually working or slacking off. Even though most workers said they were more productive from home, many executives  adopted “bossware” to monitor their staff’s laptops. (And to be fair, yes — sometimes we did step away, selfishly tending to our own personal business, like walking the dog or staring out the window while contemplating our mortality. We hope you can forgive us.) At any rate, some bankers over at Wells Fargo seem to have gotten caught last month. It’s not clear whether they were working from home or from a beach, or what they were doing instead of working. A bank spokesperson declined to offer more details about the firings, saying only that “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”