I am pretty surprised at many of the responses here. You are there to do a job, not to complete the Hunger Games trilogy.
Note that I am not claiming that I never goof off. Of course I do. But I would never be so blatant as to crack open a novel in front of the boss while I’m on the clock. And I certainly wouldn’t take umbrage (there’s that word again :D) at the boss suggesting that doing so is inappropriate.
mmm
Yeah, I don’t think it’s the least bit unreasonable for the boss to not want to see you reading a book at your desk during work hours. In fact, if I’m the boss and I see my employees reading books and doing sudokus, I’m going to start taking a real close look at head count. Not sure this is a hill you want to die on.
The Spanish Convenio Sectorial de Químicas (country-wide agreement on labor conditions for the Chemical sector) includes a paragraph stating that “employees can read or perform other non-bothersome activities during breaks in their workflow”. The Estatuto General de los Trabajadores (country-wide Labor Law) states that “employees can study during breaks in their workflow”.
I do take umbrage at bosses who insist that I must stay at work for 14h when my work is done and I’ll only get paid for 8 of those hours, but then, I’ve long been told I’m weird. IME the bosses who get angry when I’m “not doing anything work-related” despite knowing full well that my work is done for the time being are also the same ones who want everybody to put in very long hours.
I spend quite a bit of time on the Internet while at work but I also consistently close the most incidents every month so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. My manager did talk to me about it once, but that was several years ago, before I was performing at this level and he never did say anything like “knock it off and get back to work.”
My monitors face a fairly well trafficked spot in the office, so I don’t go too crazy with what I look at, mostly just SDMB and another board, I read the paper online and check out a couple other sites over lunch, and then I google a lot of stuff durring the day, some of it’s for work and some of it’s not. I don’t watch videos or go to youtube unless it’s obviously work related. Mostly, since I’m in IT, I’d hate to have some dummy in the building say “Well look what Intergalactic Galdiator is doing, how come he’s doing that?” If I really, really have to watch something, I can go into our storage room or find another place. It doesn’t hurt to have the keys that will open any door on our floors, heh heh heh.
Edit to add: I have heard of instances where a phone tech got fired for reading a motorcycle magazine during the day when the company owner walked past and saw. That was years ago and the owner’s retired. The tech probably would have been OK if he was reading a computer magazine, since it’s the industry we’re in.
I was very lucky to get the job I had all the way through college. It consisted of sitting at a desk at the front of one of the campus computer labs, handing people their printouts when they asked for them, answering the phone, and making sure nobody broke or stole any of the equipment. Beyond that, they couldn’t have cared less what we were up to, as long as it didn’t break laws, contravene university policy, or end in a flood of complaints. Most people did homework and horsed around on the internet. (There was no filtering software at all, on the grounds that the labs were for student use, and you never knew what someone might be trying to write a paper on. The only official rule about porn or games was “if you bug the other users with it, we boot you out”. No kidding.) If you happened to pull a shift in your own dormitory, you could usually get away with doing your laundry.
If my boss had ever walked in to find one of us staring blankly at a wall on paid time just because none of the patrons wanted attention, he probably would have concluded that the pod people had finally arrived, and they hadn’t done their research. I worked the combination Fri/Sat overnight lab/tech support shift for a while, and had I not had something to keep me awake, I probably would have nodded off and slept right through the ringing in the unlikely event that anyone actually called.