Posting from work... [short rant]

[Greylock]

The underlying idea that your employer owns you. They don't own you. They are paying you to assist them in the operation of whatever it is they do. It's supposed to be a mutual relationship, equal on both sides.

I work, they pay. That's the agreement between us. They even provide really darned good insurance and fringe benefits. Consider me sold.

I work, they pay. Seems equitable to me.

 

[BlueBlackRed]

But no job ever owns me.

If I'm doing something boring for hours or days on end, I don't think that checking my hotmail for 30 seconds is that big of a deal. Especially if scores of guys get together the day after a football game to chat about it for more than 10 minutes.

But I've had worse jobs, that's for sure.

I once had a boss (in a sweat shop) that believed if you used the restroom and took longer than two minutes, you were stealing from the company.

And that's one of the least jerk things he said.
I once hurt my back while picking up some scrap, so I used the forklift for it. He came and yelled at me, with some words said back and forth (and I was being nice about it).
Then he said "Do it my way or we'll f'ing find someone else to do it!"
He said that while I was in the forklift with the forks at head level, only 2 feet away.

I saw red but walked out after I saw my possible future.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

It blows my mind that people can sit at work, surf, and GET PAID for it.

I post from home, and have never posted, lurked, or anything else from work. For eight or nine hours each day, I belong to my company. Every word I say, every breath I take, every...[/Sting song]

Work is work, play is play.

Indentured servitude ended a long time ago (for the most part)....

My day job is incredibly repetitive and boring. If I don't stop every 20-30 minutes to do something not work-related for a few minutes, my productivity really drops. I can stop doing the same thing over and over and over, do something else and come back to what I'm getting paid to do refreshed and ready to go for a few more minutes.

Especially considering the smokers take more..and longer...breaks than I do.

And like BlueBlackRed said, no job ever owns me. I know that I'm 100% expendable (a trained monkey could probably do my job), but y'know what, I can always get another job.

Now, when I'm wearing my "RPG store owner" hat, I do pretty much whatever I want.

 

[Nomad4life]

I have one off period a day between teaching classes, so I often use that time to poke around online, assuming I don’t have parents to call, papers to file, lesson plans to submit, etc… The school has actually blocked access to En World, but I get around that by running a search on an old archived thread, and then getting the archive page to redirect me here. A co-worker showed me that trick on my first day… I don’t know if that works everywhere, or just here at the school, though.

As for the separate work ethics discussion, I consider the wise use of my off period to be about as important as anything else I do. If I couldn’t relax some, or get other things tended to throughout the day… I’d probably spend my day yelling at half the students and failing the other half.

See? My community needs En World!

 

[Bardsandsages]

I accomplish the work of two people in half the time, which leaves me a lot of free time on my hands. So when I have nothing to do, I go to my boss, and sales manager, and the business manager and ask if they need help with anything. If they all say no, then that's my cue that I can chat at Enworld or whatever. They know I spend time online, they know I practically run my publishing business from my desk. But they don't care. Because it would cost them twice as much to replace me, and they know that I make sure work is done and done correctly.

Just what I've saved this company this year bargain shopping online instead of using the "approved" corporate vendors has more than covered any goofing off time on the internet.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Driddle... no, I am not serious, that was sarcasm through and through...

Greylock... My workplaces rules are officially 8 hours per day, 1/2 hour for lunch and 2 15 minute breaks. 3 hours per week can be spent in a gym. Unofficially my normal hours are 7 am to 5pm with lunch at the desk, and once a month I have a weekend 'drill' that tends to run in excess of 12 hours working per day. I don't take smoke-breaks once an hour like over half the people I work with. Often I have a database query crunching through a couple thousand records for 10 to 15 minutes, during which time I used to pop on Enworld to see what was up or check out my favorite web comics for a laugh {OOTS and Goblins}

I agree that work is work, but I also agree that all work and no play tends to make me lose focus after about the third hour of looking at SQL code
{which I ended up bringing home tonight to re-read after a bit of head-clearing message boards}

I think that ethically speaking a good company should limit surfing the web as much as they limit smoke breaks... sure, it is thier ISP money but unless you are boggind down the bandwidth or bringing in virii you are not actually *costing* the company anything. Smokers, OTOH, have been proven to have higher insurance costs that directly impact the companies bottom line.... but we probably don't want to get into an argument about that..

 

[bento]

I think the hammer will be coming down soon at my job. Last week an IT employee was arrested for having the kinds of images that will earn you a visit by the FBI on his WORK LAPTOP!

What a scumbag. Made the TV news and everything.

 

[Nifft]

I think the hammer will be coming down soon at my job. Last week an IT employee was arrested for having kiddie porn on his WORK LAPTOP!

It's always the people who really should know better who get caught.
Well, and the disgusting, law-breaking perverts.

-- N

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

But no job ever owns me.

If I'm doing something boring for hours or days on end, I don't think that checking my hotmail for 30 seconds is that big of a deal. Especially if scores of guys get together the day after a football game to chat about it for more than 10 minutes.

But I've had worse jobs, that's for sure.

I once had a boss (in a sweat shop) that believed if you used the restroom and took longer than two minutes, you were stealing from the company.

And that's one of the least jerk things he said.
I once hurt my back while picking up some scrap, so I used the forklift for it. He came and yelled at me, with some words said back and forth (and I was being nice about it).
Then he said "Do it my way or we'll f'ing find someone else to do it!"
He said that while I was in the forklift with the forks at head level, only 2 feet away.

I saw red but walked out after I saw my possible future.

Should have just pointed out that if he fired you for refusing work on the grounds that it's unsafe, you could sue his butt for the value of his house, or more.

 

[BlueBlackRed]

Should have just pointed out that if he fired you for refusing work on the grounds that it's unsafe, you could sue his butt for the value of his house, or more.

Eh, not my style. I'm not a very confontational kind of person.
8 years later and I sometimes regret not hurting the jerk.

So whenever I have a bad day at my current job (like ENWorld being blocked) I remember the sweat-shop job.
My current job has coworkers with college degrees and are in happy marriages.
The sweat-shop job had coworkers who dropped out of high school, mothers who had their children permanently taken away from them, had very poor views of the police (too many domestic violence calls), and generally people too dumb to pick their own nose.