I work at a local news station where I run camera or audio. Outside of the actual shows, there isn’t much “work” for the studio crew to do during our 8 hour shift, but we have to look busy, so the best way to do that is to sit down and fiddle at a computer. Best thing to do?
Surf the internet!
Actually, work’s pretty much the only time I really spend on the internet. Every now and again, I’ll sit on AIM at home, but for all my Dope surfing, googling, online reading, and ebay stuff, I always do my work at…um, work. Hey, they’ve got high speed internet, why should I bother paying for it at home?
I really don’t have the time for serious surfing, let alone getting on the SDMB at work. I do check my home email a few times from work, but that’s it. Also, we have a program at work which shows in real time every web site that every employee is on… and it keeps a log for later inquiry and reporting.
We have (or in some cases had) some employees who have had real issues with downloading porn, etc., so the CEO asked for the above program to be implemented. Every employee has signed an acknowledgement that they shold have no expectation of privacy at work in regards to their email or internet access, since both are intended for work purposes. Employees are allowed to surf during breaks and lunch, but can’t pull up offensive stuff and can’t run streaming audio/video because it eats up all the bandwidth.
Though I have certain mandated hourly tasks ( mostly lab work ), they don’t usually take more than 5-10 minutes ( excepting slightly lengthier sets twice a shift ). I also fiddle with controls as necessary ( takes seconds, usually ), walk around a few times a shift to make sure everything is running smooth, maybe do a little maintanence and clean up a bit a couple of times a month. Occasionally for whatever reason ( i.e. start up, shut down, process upsets ), there is a lot to do.
But on your average day, a sizeable portion of my job involves sitting around waiting for something to go wrong. So I read, turn equipment checks into walks, or hang out online. It pays relatively well too - pretty sweet, really :).
I am a phone jockey doing computer tech support.
so… I wait for calls…
and ALL of my work is done on the internet. I have 2 different kinds of instant messaging just for work. during the week I am fairly busy, but saturday and sunday, I just surf and play games online 
I work nights in an office with no one else in it; there are two Internet-connected computers on my desk and five more in the room. The work I do involves fixing up a page and then waiting five to ten seconds while the computer processes, so when I’m at work I literally read the SDMB in bursts of approximately ten seconds, then work thirty seconds, then read again, &c.
You’ll notice I don’t spend much time in Great Debates.
I have internet access at work. I have been known to slip into the Dope during non-lunch hours from time to time. I’ll pop into to check a particular thread or two that I’m interested in at the moment.
However, if I’m swamped, the Dope is the furthest thing from my mind. I get all my work done in a timely manner. I don’t abuse my access to the internet.
I work in a place where there is literally nothing for me to do. Seriously, absolutely nothing, besides being friendly and cordial to people for about 30 minutes total during an 8 hour shift. I have both cable TV and internet access. TV is of no interest to me, unless there’s a spelling bee or Futurama on, so that leaves the internet (oh, and homework, which I should be doing right now).
Without internet access I would go crazy with boredom. Plus, I don’t have a computer at home, so the only time I get to go online is the two days I work a week. I love my job, but only because my job description ends up being “read the Straight Dope message boards.”
I just hope the emperor never realizes he’s not wearing any clothes…
ZJ
Same deal as many others here – I work when the customers need me, I surf the web when they don’t. It’s been kinda slow lately, so right now the work/surf split is about 70/30%.
As has been said, it varies widely with the job. My current job, I don’t even have my own computer. There are a couple scattered through the lab that we all share, when needed. But I’m usually far too busy to sit and play on the computers. Even if I had time, all frivolous internet sites have been blocked by policy. I do all my surfing at home.
But at my last job, I had maybe 15 minutes worth of actual work to do in an eight hour shift. The rest of the time, I was just there in case something broke, which it rarely did, so I ended up surfing, watching videos on my computer, or (rarely) studying. I discovered a lot of websites back then, including this one.
I used to work as a 911 dispatcher on third shift, and we too used the Internet to stay awake. Yahoo! Games were very popular there. Once all the warrants are keyed, you’re just waiting for calls, and there are quiet nights with nothing to do.
Previous to that, I had a job as an admin assistant, and I was just underutilized. I guess the previous person who had my job (even though they loved him) must have been a huge slacker, because I could do his workload in less than an hour a day. And that was on a busy day. I asked for other assignments, and when they still couldn’t always keep me busy, I asked if it was OK to surf the net. They said that was absolutely OK since I was always putting in work far before deadlines and they just didn’t need any more administrative help – it would have been more work creating work for me to do. There were only 5 other people in the office, and even with projects for all of them, I still didn’t have much to do a lot of the time.
My current job (working in a call center, started as a rep, now in management) doesn’t allow for much 'net surfing, though. It’s just as well since I’m too busy anyway.
Logging onto the internet where I work will get you fired, no ifs ands or buts. Why? Because the program that we use to score responses sends data via an internet connection. When someone logs onto the dedicated server(the only one that computers for non-management types are able to access) for another purpose, it causes it to crash as often as not.
That happened just last month when someone at the Utah site (who was working on the same project as some of our people) logged on to check their e-mail or something, and killed that entire server, which in turn caused people here to have nothing to do for over an hour while there were frantic attempts to restore it. Fortunately, most of us were on another server. AFAIK that Utah employee is now unemployed.
As you can imagine, there are frequent reminders not to use computers for anything other than scoring responses.
I have to have it for work to access various resources needed for my job, and to download software updates for a piece of software I support.
I try not to scam onto the net to goof off too much (although the other day was one notable exception to that… 
) - too easy to lose track of time.