I once walked up on a sow Grizzly bear and her young adult cub while walking my reactive to everything puppy in the woods. We were alone because anything and everything would set her off and she would scream and carry on, and was upsetting my other dog, who I had, in part, to scare bears.

They gave 0 shits about me, and the puppy didn’t notice them, despite being uncomfortably close, thank God.

My initial thought was ‘oh shit’ followed by ‘yeah, I won’t confuse them with black bears’. (Black bears can sometimes be brown, and I had always wondered how I could tell the difference between a brown bear, and a brown black-bear. The answer is: the desire to poop your pants is much greater with brown than black. Black bears, whole they technically kill more people, don’t instigate the same fear response.

I still hike the same hikes, I just double up on deterrant methods, always go with a buddy, and keep my dogs leashed if there is bear activity. (Unleashed dogs on hikes where I live is a cultural norm) Everything has risk, and I live here because I love nature.

Every time.

I want privacy, and long form thought.

Neither of those things thrive in an environment where everyone is trying to extract value from thought and personal information.

Check out project Gemini:

https://geminiprotocol.net/

“Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That’s not a new idea, but it’s not old fashioned either. It’s timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn’t about innovation or disruption, it’s about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We’re not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader’s privacy, attention and bandwidth.”

No auto playing media. No cookies. Nothing tracking you. And they built it, as I understand, to be deliberately difficult to add new features to, to prevent enshittification.

Did you know that varies state by state?

My state has a jungle primary, you see all candidates irrespective of their or your party affiliation, and you vote for the ONE candidate you want to see on the ballot.

We also have ranked choice voting, which they are trying reallllly hard to take away.

You are right. I mean a crew. You are also right, sometimes every job needs the people responsible for the work to stop and think.

This is not what the op was describing. They were describing a desire to actively avoid work that contributed to the whole, not because they had to have that time they would lose to do their job right, but because it was “extra” work. The point was “extra” isn’t always “extra”; you are being paid to be at work for x hours, you should be working. Sometimes working = thinking, but that wasn’t the story.

If I hired a crew, and Joe was sitting around with his thumb up his butt, and ducked out of the extra work his leads gave him, I suspect I would never have to say anything, because Joe probably wouldn’t have his job long enough for me to talk to the foreman.

The point was to encourage op to look at what they were doing from a different perspective that puts them in the position of having to see resources being wasted, and how it is impactful to the end result. It is good to consider things from multiple angles, so your choices are informed.

I am not sure what a pause is, so maybe I don’t understand the standards in your industry, so, grain of salt here.

If you hired a contractor to work on your house, and one guy just stood around waiting to do his part, and declined to help his peers to make the process more efficient, but you had to pay his regular rate, I bet you would be annoyed.

The ‘other duties as assigned’ expectation has been consistent during my entire career, at every job I have ever had. I have never held a job where, if I was not busy, and someone else was, and I possessed the ability to help, where I was not supposed to pitch in. That is just what you do to support the peers you work with, which should be the goal. Your organization is there to provide a thing (no matter what the org is) and everyone hired is meant to support achieving the goal.

I can empathize with the desire to malicious compliance, but… I would make sure ‘other duties as assigned’ are genuinely not a part of the expectations, because if they are, this is a pretty lickity split route to not having this job anymore. No manager wants to have to either chase someone down and argue about being generally helpful, or place additional work on your peers because you want to do less.