Has your place of employment fired anyone over their addicton to technology?

It happened this week in the store where I’m a cashier. The rule is simple: No phoning or tweeting during your work hours. First offense, you lose a day of work. Second offense, you lose a week of work. Third offense, you’re fired. One of our stock boys, a nice 19 year old college student who worked well and got along with people, but could not get off the damn device.

No matter how well they work, they are not there to talk or tweet. Yet some of them cannot stop. And get fired.

There is a local orthodontist I have done business with whose wife runs the office and makes all the assistants put their phones in a box in her office while on duty. This was her final draconian solution after giving numerous warnings.

Is Tweeting shorthand for non-call based phone use, or do they actively monitor employee Twitter accounts?

I am not aware of it happening. I am also a cashier and I can see how it would be more tempting for someone stocking to be stuck on their phone that someone ringing up customers. It would be pretty obvious if I was texting or whatever on the job.

We’re supposed to leave our phones in our lockers. That’s what I was told when I was hired. Not long after, we were having a coupon issue and the manager said, just use the calculator on your phone to figure out the discount and adjust the price. I was like :dubious: Aren’t they supposed to be in our lockers? Turns out that’s the policy, but no one follows it. Not even the managers.

Not fired. But a few years ago, it was announced everyone was going to get a bonus. The only catch was that you had to be in “good standing” with no disciplinary actions.

A month or so before the bonus checks were sent out, a whole bunch of people were called into HR for various offenses. Excessive internet usage was at the top of the list. And none of them received a bonus.

Before I’m accused of threadshitting, instead of “addiction,” it might be stupidity and a poor work ethic.

We had a guy hauled away by the cops for child porn on the company computer. Not quite the same thing.

I don’t think that happens in my line of work. People are more or less permanently attached to their laptop and smart phone.

Do you consider the telephone as “technology”? Because even back in the day before cell phones, my office fired a woman because she just couldn’t stay off of the phone.

Earbuds on the (warehouse) floor can draw you the walk-of-shame right out the front gate. Checking a cell phone draws a write-up, answering it basically counts as two strikes as does sending a text. Three strikes and you are gone for good with no chance of return.

Yeah – I’ve seen a few dozen folks lose their jobs over tech as you outlined it – and that is just this year so far.

Any kind of unauthorized technology is illegal in prison and cell phones were high up on the list.

If you were lucky, you’d get a ninety day suspension without pay for the first offense. If you were unlucky on the first offense or if it was a second offense, you’d be fired. If you were really unlucky, you’d also be arrested.

I work in a detention center, and despite rules prohibiting cell phones or streaming media on workplace computers, no one has ever gotten more than a reprimand.

This happened to me a while back.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=794696

Also a while back, I was at a Hy-Vee, which is a Midwestern grocery store chain, and they had signs by the cash registers, impossible to miss because they were printed on fluorescent paper, stating that using a phone while working was an immediate firing offense. :cool: It said that if someone needed to receive a phone call, that person could call them through the switchboard, and making phone calls could be done on breaks.

The hospital where I used to work had a TV in the break room, until two pharmacists in particular decided to watch sports all day on the weekends instead of working. :mad: One of them was our department’s Little Golden Boy so I’m sure nothing happened to him; the other one was not so privileged but AFAIK he’s still there a decade or so later. I wouldn’t be surprised if people died because of this.

I’ve also had co-workers, going back to the 1980s, who got in various levels of trouble because they made or received too many personal phone calls. I’m not talking about something like kids calling when they got home from school; I mean they would spend more time on the phone than they did working.

It’s tough, though. Cell phones can be a real asset at work. Customers ask questions and one can often get a good answer to a difficult question in seconds with a phone.

When I worked at Blockbuster, we all used our cell phones during work hours, it seemed. I tried to limit my usage to answering customers’ questions via Google and imdb and stuff.

When the store was empty and there was nothing else to do, I would play music, or play Reversi with one of my friends.

Several a week in fact. I worked at a call center contracted to take calls for Directv. Phones were very strictly prohibited in work area. It was a security issue for the client, they couldn’t risk employees committing credit card fraud and identity theft by taking pictures of the customers account. Our call center staffed about 300 employees and a week didn’t go by without watching the security guards escorting at least 2 employees, just on my shift alone, out of the building. For some reason people just could not comprehend the “We have cameras everywhere but the bathroom, you will be seen” warnings posted through out the building.

Interesting thread. I’ve been retired for 17 years, so I haven’t experienced this, but I understand that professors are having a problem with students texting incessantly during lectures. I don’t know what I would do. Of course, all devices have to be banned during exams (unless simple calculators are allowed, but I would try to design tests not requiring them, as indeed I always did).

No, and frankly I wish the bosses would crack down a little.

If you do your work, fine, your use at your desk doesn’t need to be monitored.

BUT, when in a meeting, people need to stop texting, tweeting, Facebooking, whatever. It’s rude to the other people in the meeting when a couple of people just are checked out, and when people “multitask”, they are always the ones who up losing the thread of the meeting, asking that something just discussed be explained, and slowing the meeting down.

(We have a couple of doctors on staff; if they respond to a text or have to step out to make a call, I get that. The rest of us are not on call for patient care and can put down our damn phones for thirty minutes.)

It drives me crazy.

But I"m a middle-aged grump.

Not my employer but definitely my industry: Northwest Airlines Flight 188 - Wikipedia.

Oops. :smack:

Yes.

Where i work, you are not supposed to bring any electronic devices into the building
not even a thumb drive.
You are also not allowed to bring anything in that you can write on or with.
Absolutely nothing that you could record anything with in any form.

Knowing this people still bring them in, and then some are even stupid enough to plug it into their work station, sends the network guys a nice big alert that someone has plugged in a data device into PC xyz.

Then you get escorted to your last view of the parking lot.
A lot of people have had that escort.

Not to whine too much, but I resist the tendency we all have to use the word “addiction” so loosely. In this case, as someone earlier at least touched on, this is NOT a case of “addiction.” It’s simple lack of self-discipline.

Anyway. The bigger challenge to businesses related to this these days, is that whereas plain voice-based cell phones obviously had no business function in most cases, nowadays, more and more of the basic everyday functions of life REQUIRE that you have a working tech connection.

I’m a service tech, making my meager living going from place to place repairing a variety of electronic devices. My entire job depends on my cell phone being fully functional. while I haven’t seen anyone actually fired for NOT using their phone, I’ve seen many threats to do so. At the same time, since the Federal government gets anal about taxes, we’ve also been warned not to use our business cell phone for personal calls, since if we make too many, the company could lose the expense deduction for them.