I do. But it is one of the situations that converge in a kind of mutually beneficial indifference. It is no different in spirit from that of a husband and wife who live under the same roof but seek intimacy elsewhere, or who have repressed their desires for so long that they no longer even remember how to make a baby.
If you speak up too much, you wind up with bullshit work. Example: "refactoring" code for a project/dependency that isn't even used, writing tests just to hit that 99% coverage level, updating wiki articles that nobody reads. This is arguably worse than doing nothing.
This is what happened and would happen again. It is much better to say that you are busy with some vague project or initiative and actually taking a nap.
Yep. I know guys who'd take off for half the day, every day. Long lunches. Workouts. Walks around the city. Even naps. Eventually they got laid off but it was easy living for a while.
My first job out of college was like this. My manager knew I had no work and had no particular interest in letting me take on anything I proposed or found. I ended up quitting a few months in because (on top of a few other issues) I found it way too soul-destroying to have nothing to do.
This is because it takes work to make work. There's planning, and scoping, and cross-functional coordination, and, and, and.
From that angle its easy to understand why a manager would like to do little, as long as their manager has a similar relationship with them.