Your last is extremely easy to explain: if you say you're idle your immediately given a new task. That's not a bad thing per se. However, management always fai

Your last is extremely easy to explain: if you say you're idle your immediately given a new task. That's not a bad thing per se. However, management always fails to account for e.g. mental fatigue after finishing an important milestone that most of the time has been grinding hard at for the last month. That fatigue needs a week or so to disappear by itself -- just getting one good massage, sex and sleep doesn't fix everything. If you're loaded with work again starting tomorrow you'll do a sloppy job and will keep accumulating more fatigue. I'm not saying an army of unmotivated lazy slackers doesn't exist out there. It absolutely does. But not everyone is like them. Sometimes people really do need to relax a bit in order to recover their ability to be useful to the business. Our stupid system of requiring 8h a day for 5 out of 7 days misses 99% of all human specifics and it simply doesn't care. That's not okay.