You Got That Right

Can you too slack off your way to fabulous riches?

As Americans, we hold it self-evident that we enjoy a number of unalienable rights that somehow got left out of the Constitution, just a few of which include:

• The right to wait until we get to the front of the line to start thinking about what to order

• The right to leave our empty shopping cart wherever the hell we want

• The right to carry on phone conversations about the graphic details of our personal medical conditions in public

And then of course there’s the Constitutional right to complain that our Constitutional rights are being violated over minor inconveniences that have nothing to do with the Constitution.

But perhaps the Founding Fathers’ most significant omission was a right many Americans believe most fervently in — the right to amass fabulous wealth without having to do much, if anything, to actually earn it.

And why shouldn’t we? Lord knows the wealthy represent the smartest, most industrious and generally the very best among us — a controversial opinion, I know, but one I’m willing to express even if it means risking that my Twitter posts will get boosted by the platform’s new owner and all-around great guy Elon Musk.

Unlike Musk, however, not all of us had the foresight to be born into a family that owned multiple emerald mines to provide us with that little extra “leg up” on our way to vast riches. 

Class Act All the Way

But that’s OK because in this country if you stay focused, apply yourself and really keep at it, eventually you… will probably still not achieve much. But you might be lucky enough to get injured somehow along the way and cash in on a class action lawsuit.

I routinely receive emails offering to join my name to a range of such legal actions. The most frequent lately are messages inquiring whether I experienced a “serious illness” after drinking contaminated water at the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base in North Carolina. 

Sadly for me and my financial future, I’ve never been to Camp Lejeune, much less been diagnosed with a “serious illness” after drinking the water there, so my chances of cashing in on this particular lawsuit appear slim. 

But other opportunities abound. For example, another recent email informs me that a “settlement may be available” if I have a “Defective Hernia Mesh.” Again, no luck, as I’ve never had a hernia, to say nothing of one that required treatment with a mesh (whatever that is) that turned out to be defective. Although if you received a defective hernia mesh while at Camp Lejeune you’re probably rolling in dough right now — that is, assuming your “serious illness” and botched operation still allow you to perform that kind of lateral movement.

Achieving Top Billing

But there are other litigation-free paths to Easy Street. I recently saw a story about a decidedly industrious Lithuanian man named Evaldas Rimasauskas who reportedly made $122 million by submitting phony invoices that Google and Facebook nevertheless chose to pay. It makes sense how such a scheme might work — huge corporations pay tens of billions of dollars’ worth of invoices every year, so who’s got time to look closely at EVERY SINGLE ONE that gets sent to them, right? Especially over mere pocket change like $122 million? 

Naturally, some consider Rimasauskas’ actions unethical, but were they? Just because he mailed out a bunch of phony invoices — he can’t be blamed if a few giant corporations were dumb enough to pay them, right?

It turns out that he can, actually. Submitting bogus invoices is illegal, and Rimasauskas, who at least one irresponsible commentator recently described as “industrious,” is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for wire transfer fraud. So maybe there is a downside to this particular path to easy riches. 

All Quiet on the Workplace Front

On the other hand, you may not particularly care about getting rich, and your main concern is not having to work very hard. If so, you’re in luck thanks to a remarkable workplace innovation experts refer to as “quiet quitting.”

Quiet quitting, as you may have heard from pearl-clutching stories in the business press, is a phenomenon by which workers perform the bare minimum at their jobs, with little to no concern for their professional advancement, the company’s bottom line, or even – gasp! – the impact on stockholders. 

I appreciate the media reporting on this as if they’ve discovered some radical new trend, like no one ever slacked off at work before 2020. I guess when I was toiling away at temp jobs in the 1990s and took longer-than-necessary bathroom breaks, played Tetris on my work computer and snuck naps behind stacks of boxes in the supply closet, I wasn’t being lazy, I was just ahead of my time!

The “Quiet Quitting” world champion, however, has to be the unnamed Italian government employee who made news last year after authorities discovered he had been receiving a regular paycheck despite not showing up to work for 16 years, along the way taking home a reported $580,000. This guy is like Italy’s version of Cal Ripken, except if Cal Ripken were famous for all the consecutive days he DIDN’T play baseball.

Sadly, the authorities are now apparently cracking down on him (the Italian civil servant, not Cal Ripken), and he may soon join fellow scofflaw Evaldas Rimasauskas behind bars. But who knows, perhaps one day we will realize that these individuals we’re criminalizing today were actually misunderstood slacker visionaries who deserve admiration for their moxie and creativity rather than condemnation.

And then they can file a class action lawsuit.