Sometimes there’s quite a wait between jobs, so naturally it gets filled with web surfing - which leads to the question: “Know anyone who’s been fired/disciplined for internet abuse at work?”
I know there are web page tracking programs, but do companies or govt agencies spend a lot of time and $ reviewing the results? I get a little nervous about it…
/back to work…well, maybe after a couple more minutes/
Yes, I do. It’s a public school. He was downloading porn. Lots and lots of porn, apparently. That’s a bit of a no-no when you work in a school.
Me too. Only my friend was burning said porn onto CD’s and selling them. Another no-no when you work for the Mega Whopper Engineering Co.
My wife once disciplined someone for running an ebay auction business during working hours.
And she locked out ebay for all her users.
There is a temp in my department right now that says she got fired from her last job because she was downloading porn. She said porn was found on her PC but that she was set up. It was put on their by the Network Admin. because they had a hard on against her and wanted her fired.
I wasn’t disciplined technically, but I was told to be more discreet. For appearances more than anything else.
OTOH, stuff like porn or running a business will and have gotten people fired from here.
Whilst working for a company four years ago, one of my managers was dismissed for “Inappropriate use of the internet”.
We made the assumption that he had been looking at porn for a while until it came to light that five people had been cautioned for just that. As higher management thought that our manager had some kind of solar beam protruding from his posterior we concluded that he must have done something more extreme.
A little investigation (involving buying drinks for an IT staff member) revealed that his account had been used to access sites containing child pornography.
I don’t think anyone’s going to be surprised that it lead to a dismissal.
At my previous job, one of the other techs was fired and escorted off the premises…
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… for selling our equipment on eBay!
Aside from that, no. I’m here (SDMB) all day, eBay occasionally, … no one has ever said a word to me.
Hehehe, “porn was found on her computer, because they had a hard on against her” … mmm
Eh, anyhow. Haven’t been disciplined, but did get a bit of a raised eyebrow from the techies at our headoffice way back when. They said if it were anyone else they would have told them off, but they rekoned I “knew what I was doing”. Em, yep, mudding 90% of my work day. What a strange way to put it…
My mate works for a major international shipping/courier company, and their internet access is severely limited. They can only use internet on their lunch breaks, and their mails are filtered for “inapropriate language”. They can not recieve image fiels. This which was probably meant to increase efficianct has just taught them to type $hit, b0ll0x etc like true little leet-speakers, and means that the funny pics they want to send eachother have to be made into a powerpoint presentation before being sent. Talk about counterproductive?
Heh, sounds like BS to me. When people have these “they were out to get me” stories, why don’t they ever file suits or grievances against the company in question? People I’ve known who’ve legitimately been screwed over by a company generally fight pretty hard, at least to clear their name.
Yes. At a previous job one coworker was disciplined, though not fired, for excessive use. There was at least one termination as well, though not in the department I was in.
Yes, I was disciplined several times for using the internet and e-mail during work hours. The last time, I was actually confronted with print-outs of several months worth of personal e-mail. Even after that humiliation, it was still a hard habit to break, but I finally did. Then I retired 
Yep me. I got a promotion once…and had it revoked because I was told I was a security risk for accessing the internet. It was supposed to be used for business only…and I was here.
yep, my company just did a sweep, the guy behind me got nailed. Mind you, my company has blocking software (pretty strict too, I used to get nailed with the ‘rembember that internet use agreement you signed?’ screen probably once a week on links from SMDB), so you have to work to get porn. The most ironic thing is, a member of info security (i.e., the ones that are supposed to be monitoring this stuff) was a casualty too.
excessive internet/IM use - well, there have been warnings, and I can think of a couple of cases where it probably was a factor in the decision to let someone go.
err that’s SDMB (not the Sado-masochism database)
There were some people here who were canned for “inappropriate content” on their machines. The higher-ups weren’t much more specific than that, but it seemed pretty clear it was pornography related.
I also had one of my former employers monitor mine, and a coworker’s IM conversations. It wasn’t verboten, but they read our stuff from time to time. We knew they sniffed the network, but we weren’t sure to what extent they analyzed/read the information. We never would have known had not one of the managers made an off-the-cuff remark that he only could have arrived at through reading IM conversations. Unfortunately for them… we were the network and server admins for part of the company, and had access to… well, everything, if we wanted it. All their sniffing machines and software mysteriously stopped working after we discovered how they used it.
Yeah, I know. Whenever she starts telling this story I ask her why she didn’t bring charges against them. She said that there’s no way she could prove she was wronged. She also says that three other people were fired for the exact same reason and that their lawsuits didn’t go any where. The funny thing is that she says that the exact porn pictures were put on all of their computers yet she has no way to prove she was framed. I told her once that its OK to look at porn, just not on a work PC. Thats why you have a home PC.
Thanks for the inputs. I’m somewhat encouraged because I haven’t heard too much about it in gov’t service, and there really ought to be some. I hate wasting taxpayer money as much as anybody. Nevertheless… [/hypocrite mode off]
Does anybody know how web tracking software works? For instance, does the software only track if you go to the SD message boards, or does it track our individual keystrokes and the temp files that download from something like FARK.com? I’d hate to see some of that dredged up.
Yes, a girl I know was fired for sending personal emails all day at work. The fact that she neglected her job to do this probably led to her being sacked though.
The funniest one was a bloke in one of the warehouses who kept forwarding chain emails to every single user in the company. All Head Office Departments, all the factories, warehouses, stores at once. When the Head of IT mailed a warning to him, he also very kindly CC’d every single user in the company on the message (on purpose). God, how embarrassing, but how funny.