my Mother in law has this bad habit of hitting respond to all, and well, I included her on an out of office email.
Great- everyone from the VP of my department to every outside agency contact got a goofy response from “loony lucy” asking in that virtually whiny way where I was going. Serves me right.
My neighbor got severly flamed for downloading software from the internet. He was a breath away from getting fired. He, too, swears it was a conspiracy
Hell, I got “talked to” for inappropriate (excessive) Internet use back in 1990. Beat that!
Anyway, I was “talked to” about surfing too much at one of my previous jobs, but nothing since then. My current company’s policy is more or less: “if your work is being done well, we don’t care, but if you find something really good, share.”
Our gateways will eat anything encrypted or password-protected, including .zip files.
As for out internet use policy - as long as it’s not illegal, fattening or “excessive” it’s OK. The “excessive” is intentionally undefined but generally assumed to mean anything that interferes with getting work done or consuming bandwith or resources to the point of impacting our customers’ ability to use our online systems. My building has redundant OC-768 fiber connections to the corporate backbones, so bandwidth hasn’t been a significant problem yet. 
Mr. Butrscotch has been the guy on the other end of the sniffer and snooper software a lot; in one particular case, he had an employee who was going to forbidden sites and then going into the network and deleting his log files. Unfortunately, there was a keystroke monitor on him…and so his deletion of the log files was what got him fired.
When hubby was managing the computers at a large military hospital, about once a month he’d bring home a story about a young soldier who’d gotten court-martialed for looking at porn. They have good enough security flags and filters that it would pop up EVERY time it happened, and they could find the culprit with no difficulty. This after warnings, warnings, and more warnings. Like everyone says, that’s what home computers are for!
My office is at home now, so I have no one to care how much time I waste online, which means it’s up to ME to make myself work – a true challenge at times. My last office job was a “please be responsible about your internet usage” place; as long as we did our jobs well, no hassles. Of course, I hadn’t discovered SDMB then, which is probably why I left the job on good terms.
How 'bout flunking out of college in 1988 due to not going to class, owing to a rampant usenet addiction?
u cn smtms gt a gd jb wthut a dgree nywy
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I had a coworker who didn’t use the company computers to surf - but he used VNC or PCAnywhere to connect with his office PC to his home PC to do whatever he liked with the home PC’s connection. He’s now a former coworker.
Someone at my office was fired for running Ebay scams off his work computer. He was using his work email address and phone number too! I don’t think they have a tight watch on our computer stuff because they only realized what was going on after one of the customers who was ripped off discovered his email address and emailed the entire tech department with this long and detailed account of what our coworker was doing. I never saw the guy again and they changed the locks!