I know there’s plenty of paperwork to be done, but who knew you could work from home as a police officer? Well, apparently you can, but this one officer’s work-from-home hack has backfired in his face and cost him his job.

PC Liam Reakes clocked more than 100 fake hours by weighing down the Z key on his keyboard so that his computer didn’t go into sleep mode.

The Avon and Somerset officer, based in Yeovil, quit from his job as he was being investigated, but would have been sacked anyway, a tribunal found.

PC Reakes opened a blank Word document and held down the button during multiple shifts between June and September 2023, racking up 100+ hours where he doing F-all. Sometimes, he would keep the Z key held down for up to four hours a session.

Reakes denies trying to trick bosses that he was working from home when he wasn’t, and claims weighing down the Z button allowed him to see his computer screen and respond quickly to notifications.

He did accept his work fell below the standard expected, but denied gross misconduct.

There had been concerns about Reakes’ performance throughout 2024 anyway, and it was only when bosses took a closer look that they realised what he was up to.

An internal audit of keystrokes in September 2024 then found that his total was much higher than others doing similar jobs. Throughout his deception, Reakes input roughly 10.8 million Zs into the computer!

Reakes argued that he was suffering from a lack of support and motivation and claimed he held down the Z button to help his mental health. Which really does take being ‘Gen Z’ to a whole new level.

The police service’s barrister Mark Ley-Morgan was not having any of Reakes’ excuses:

‘We are all entitled to take a break and have a cup of tea but this was far beyond that.

‘There is no place in the police service for dishonest officers.’

The panel’s chair, Craig Holden, called the officer’s behaviour ‘deceitful and dishonest’.

‘He had lied during [the disciplinary] interview process when he could have come clean, and the activity was regular and sustained.’

Avon and Somerset Police’s Det Supt Larisa Hunt added:

‘PC Reakes was the subject of an action plan and was allocated a tutor due to concerns over his performance prior to the keyboard audit being carried out.

‘The use of any device or system to replicate keyboard activity is wholly wrong and deceptive and the public will be rightly outraged at this behaviour.’

Sure enough, Liam Reakes has been banned from returning to the police service again. Obviously he’s not the only person p1ssing about on the job, and work from home studies have shown that people are only really productive for short bursts of time up to 2 hours a day, but if he had just been playing World of Wordcraft in another window rather than trying to deceive his bosses by weighing down the Z key, he’d probably still be in a job. He tried to be too clever with it!

The funniest part about this story is that Z is the perfect letter for what he did. A Gen Z copper using the letter Z to keep his computer from sleeping while he “slept” on the job. At least he made us all giggle, if nothing else.

For the police officer who was caught red-handed stealing snacks from Lidl, click HERE. What was he thinking?