There's a story floating around the internet that's so good that it can't be true – but I really, really want it to be. According to a Verizon security blog, a developer employed by an American company has been caught outsourcing his own job to China – giving him much-needed extra time to watch YouTube videos about cats.

The Register reports that the wheeze was discovered when an American critical infrastructure company hired Verizon to set up an internet system that would allow staff to work from home. Verizon discovered that the traffic logs “showed a regular series of logins to the company's main server from Shenyang, China, using the credentials of the firm's top programmer, ‘Bob’”. At first they suspected some malware was to blame and so decided to study Bob’s computer habits to find out the source. To their surprise, the real reason why someone was logging on from China was far more benign, malign and brilliant:

Verizon investigators found that [Bob] had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming work for him, and had FedExed them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account. He was paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work and spent the rest of his time on other activities.

What did those other "activities" consist of? Apparently it was:

9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time
2:00-ish p.m – Facebook updates, LinkedIn
4:30 p.m. – End-of-day update e-mail to management
5:00 p.m. – Go home

Throw in a steady diet of custard cream biscuits and this is my idea of heaven – and it wasn’t doing Bob’s productivity any harm, either. According to one source, “His [work] was clean, well written, and submitted in a timely fashion. Quarter after quarter, his performance review noted him as the best developer in the building.”

The Register reports that Bob got canned, which is a great tragedy. For not only is Bob a modern hero to the terminally bored office worker, he’s also invented a whole new way of making capitalism work. If big companies can outsource labour to save money, why the heck can’t the little man do exactly the same? On that principle, I’m going to ring round all the colleges in Beijing and see if there are any budding bloggers out there. If you see a spike in posts about how China's going to take over the world, you’ll know what’s happened…