Many of us have found ourselves in jobs where there just wasn’t much work to do. We spent days sitting at desks surfing the Internet, while using innovations like the boss key, in case we needed to show our boss some pretense of being “busy.” This is ultimately a demoralizing and demeaning existence of pseudo-leisure, time which is not our own but is not being used for any purpose.

Anyone who has had that experience no doubt smiled at the story of Spanish civil servant Joaquín Garcia, an employee of a municipal water company. When he was considered for an award for twenty years of service, it was discovered that he had not in fact shown up for work in six years, while continuing to draw his paycheck.

Garcia insisted there was simply no work for him to do, and that he had been put in the job in the first place as political retaliation. Other sources contested the original report, claiming that he did show up to work but merely spent his time reading philosophy — becoming an expert on Spinoza, according to Mr Garcia — which would make him just another case of dreary workplace pseudo-leisure.