I've worked for one company remotely for about seven years. I pull all my tasks from an automated system, submit them, submit my hours, and cash my check. My contact with live people at the business is limited. I once went more than two years without talking to a live human there. As a result, I'm unintentionally excluded from all discussions. They sometimes forget I'm on staff and have hired new people to cover new projects, only realizing later that they should have just forwarded them to me.
An engineer friend of mine said he dealt with something similar, but works for a large corporation. Due to management shifts, he didn't have a direct supervisor, so there was nobody to assign him work. He went more than a month having no work to do at all. He went into the office and played games all day.
