Minimum Effort
Minimum Effort: Office Sim
Work From Home Simulator for iPhone
Home Office is the fifth career in Minimum Effort and the only one where the boss is a program. There is no patrol and no line of sight, because nobody can see you. Instead everything is counted, and a number cannot be charmed.
Free download. Home Office is the Home Office Pack, a single purchase.
The inversion
Every rule the other four run on is turned around
In an office you manage what people believe. Standing behind a pillar works. A good excuse works. Being liked works. In the flat none of that exists. What exists is a status light, an activity bar and a keystroke total, and at the end of the week somebody reads a summary of all three.
That is why this career punishes patterns rather than moments. There is no instant where you are caught. There is a Friday where the chart is short.
Yellow at four, away at ten
Four consecutive minutes without a keystroke turns the dot yellow. Ten turns it to away. Those are the numbers real software uses, which is the only reason the joke lands.
The bar falls faster than it climbs
The activity bar loses six hundredths per idle minute and gains ten per active one. Below a third of full, the end of day summary starts taking real bites out of you.
The shortfall bites three times harder
Missing the quota in the corporate office costs 0.28 suspicion per missing unit. In the flat it costs 0.9. Nobody is watching you, so the only thing left to judge is the output, and it is judged strictly.
The object
The mouse jiggler is the best thing you own and the worst thing to be caught with
Thirty minutes of the dot staying green and the bar staying up while you are on the sofa. It produces a little perceived work and nothing else. There are two catches. It can only hold the bar at 72 percent, never higher, so a whole day of jiggling still reads as a person who did not do very much. And if IT goes looking, it is the single most expensive thing in this world to be found with.
Somebody has enabled keystroke counts. Yours are in the bottom quartile and there is a chart.
Sitting in a call on mute
This world's version of looking busy. Forty five minutes, genuinely free, and it stays free right up until somebody asks you a question.
Cameras on, everyone
Two minutes' notice, and you are wearing exactly what you are wearing. Turn it on and sit up straight, say the camera is broken, or loop a still of yourself nodding. The third one works and IT remembers it.
The flat
Eight rooms, no corridor, and a cat
The floor plan is a flat rather than an office: desk, kitchen, sofa, bed, bathroom, balcony, front door and the laundry. The walk between them is short, because the risk here was never the corridor. Lying down for a moment costs seventy five minutes. Putting a wash on costs twenty five. Nipping out to the shops costs sixty five and is the closest thing to a long lunch that this career has.
The events are the ones that only happen at home. Somebody drilling upstairs since eight. A parcel for a neighbour who is out and a driver who is not leaving. Somebody at the door who would like to talk about your energy supplier. The cat, which has typed forty one characters into the shared document, one of which went to the wrong channel.
Four other careers exist, and two of them are in the free download.
The people you never meet
They still gossip. It is just written down now
Jonas will cover for you. Wei notices an unearned win. Sofia has already told two other people. Henrik keeps a note of when people go quiet. The floor talks at three quarters of full speed here, faster than the corporate office and slower than the startup, and the difference is that a channel keeps a record.
The ladder runs from Remote Associate on 52,000 to Head of Distributed Delivery on 148,000, across five rungs, with the daily quota climbing from 70 to 188 as you go.
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