NOT ALL HEROES WEAR CAPES – Some probably don’t wear very much at all – tip your hats to this entrepreneurial Spaniard:
A Spanish public servant who skipped work for a decade without anyone noticing spent his free time running a male brothel and drawing erotic comics.
Carles Recio, who was paid a 50,000 euro ($80,000) salary as an archives director in Valencia’s provincial government, would show up to the office every morning at 7:30am to clock in using the fingerprint scanner before heading home, only returning to the office at 3:30pm to clock out.
He kept up the routine for 10 years before colleagues began to raise suspicions. After Spanish newspaper El Mundo broke the story 18 months ago, Mr Recio was finally sacked, despite his insistence that he had done nothing wrong.
“I have only done what they have asked me to do,” he told the paper in January.
Mr Recio maintained that he worked from home. “No one can show me a photograph in which I’m in a cafeteria, I’m a man of action,” he told the Spanish TV channel La Sexta.
“I do documentation work out of the office, the work of a slave. Working like a slave means that I work so that others get the fruit of my labour.”
State authorities abandoned an attempt to prosecute him after deciding his actions did not constitute a crime, but an administrative tribunal in Valencia this week banned Mr Recio from holding public posts for nine years for his “flagrant neglect of the essential duties inherent to the work post”.
If only more bureaucrats did less damage to the world outside by actually not doing anything and instead made a productive contribution by running brothels.
