OK, so my boss is reading my coworker's email . . .

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

. . . with good reason, mind you. See, she has this habit of disappearing on us. Sometimes it’s not work-related (like when she failed to show up at my boss’s wedding, the day after she quizzed me on what I’d be wearing), but most of the time it is (too many examples to list), and it happens at least three times a year. This year it has already happened twice.

So this week, when she didn’t show up on Tuesday morning, we checked “The Book” (a datebook kept in the front of our office, where everyone writes down his/her appointments–time and location, and expected duration–for the week so that we can make sure that at least ONE of the four of us is going to be in the office at any given time) and she had blocked out Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but wrote in no information except the name of a nearby city.

My boss was a little peeved, because she had told NOBODY that she’d be going out of town this week (she spent all of last week at a conference in Cleveland), and the general rule is that if you’re going to be out for a whole day (or more), you let everyone know verbally. But we’re all used to this kind of crap from her, and so looked forward to the drama that would ensue when she returned on Friday (well, OK, maybe my BOSS wasn’t looking forward to it, but I gotta have some kind of entertainment around here . . . ).

Anyway, as you may have guessed, she ain’t here today. And nobody has heard a peep out of her. So my boss is in her office, reading the messages in her work email account for a clue.

And for some reason that just makes me go :eek:.

Granted, I do NOT have the tendency to disappear, but what if something DID happen, what if I got hit by a bus and wound up in a coma, and all of my loved ones, in the midst of their heartbreak, forgot to let my boss know, so he went combing through my office email to try to figure out what was going on?

Honey, may as well go ahead and pull the plug on me, because I would DIE if he read some of the email I get here.

I’m off to conduct one giant Delete-O-Rama right now . . .

P.S. The email search yielded nothing, so now my boss is off to her house to look for her car.

2

Well, it is his right, and she is MIA, but I would frown on it if he just did it for his own amusement. I try to keep my work e-mail pretty clean.

3

It makes me go :eek:, too, but he’s in the right both legally and ethically. Since your workplace is paying for the computer, electricity and e-mail program, your boss has every right to check that e-mail account any time of the day.

I’m not a lawyer, of course, but as I understand it, the same goes for any mail that is sent to your workplace. Whether personal or business, if the address is that of work, your boss has every right to open it up and peruse it.

In fact, I tell the teachers in my district that they need to be careful of what they browse, save and download on their computer. As an admin, I have every right to go through their files, whether they created those files here or brought them from home.

It’s invasive, sure, but it’s definitely an invasion I feel an employer has an ethical right to.

Now, truthfully, I’m not sure how the law works for personal e-mail accounts on web pages (like Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc…). I mean, does an employer have the right to access your personal web account if you check your mail from work? This is assuming, of course, that he has found out your user name and password (maybe through a keylogging or caching program) and you know beforehand that he has that right. (Which may or may not be important, law-wise.)

At that point you’re still using the workplace’s computer, software and electricity, so I don’t know where the line is drawn. Do any of the lawyer Dopers know?

4

I agree with Kalhoun. As an IT professional, I know to permanently delete all email I wouldn’t want my boss to read immediately.

I assume all email I send from work is being read. It isn’t, but it’s a good rule by which to live.

5

If she is saleried and getting paid, and she ain’t there, then it’s perfectly acceptable for the BOSS to see what’s up.

6

Oh, no, please don’t misunderstand–I know that it’s well within his rights, and don’t blame him for doing this at all, it’s just that until this happened, I had never really given much thought to what email I send and receive from which account.

Now, I will be thinking about it a lot more carefully.

For anyone who’s interested in an update, my boss went to her apartment and found her car in the lot, so he buzzed her. When he got no answer, he talked the manager into opening up her place, and she wasn’t in there.

Now he’s trying to track down her acquaintances, and I’m calling hospitals.

But I can’t help but feel like this is going to end like it always does: she’s going to come breezing in here next week, with a completely implausible story, he’s going to be mad anyway, she’s going to get defensive and start yelling, and then she’s going to come into my office, crying, to bitch about what a big meanie my boss is.

Then again, the day we anticipate that and fail to look for her ass is the day that something really is going to be amiss (dammit, I had to type “amiss” three times, because I kept accidentally typing, “anus”).

7

JuanitaTech, does your company’s AUP say anything about webmail accounts and access to them?

8

Um…I understand his right to read her email and her appointment books. I also understand she is in the wrong for not letting somebody know where she was going to be, or letting them know she wouldn’t be there at all.

However, I see no right of his whatsoever for him to get his apartment manager to open up her apartment. I know that regardless of any wrongdoings on her part, if I were she, I would be absolutley furious for someone entering my home. Yes, she could be hurt or missing or whatever, but it’s not the boss’ place to go off on a manhunt for her. He may have his heart in the right place, but it sounds more like he’s just angry and wants to know where she is. I may be wrong, of course.

I can tell you right now if my boss did that, I would raise immortal hell about it. He had no right to do that. He’s not her parent (unless he is, and I missed it in the OP) nor her SO or spouse.

That’s probably what is going on anyway…she’s taken a little quicky vacation and didn’t feel the need to inform anybody about it, which is decidedly wrong to do. But so is getting her apartment manager open up an employee’s apartment, as far as I’m concerned.

9

Bwahahahahahaha! auntie, get your butt to Minneapolis and clean the salad dressing out of my keyboard.

10

I wouldn’t have a problem with him going to her apartment if she were really, truly missing. However, she wrote this little “disappearance” in on the calendar, so that’s not the case.

The woman is in the wrong for not going through proper channels to inform people of her vacation, however.

11

You do have a point, Sylkyn, but you should know that there are only four of us here in the office, and we are all pretty good friends. Not parents or spouses of each other, no, but good enough friends that it’s reasonable for him to be concerned on a level beyond A Boss’s Ire.

That said, I happen to think that she IS going to freak out a little, because she freaks out enough when the apartment maintenance people enter her apartment without proper warning (I believe the general policy is 24 hours’ notice for non-emergency repairs and such).

And the first thing I thought was that this was something she was going to be able to use against him when the inevitable Showdown occurs.

Of course, maybe this is some tactic he’s using to discourage her from continuing to do this.

Anyway, if I were in her shoes (well, if I had “legitimately” disappeared, like in the aforementioned bus accident scenario, and wasn’t just trying to pull a fast one for an extra day off, so there was no chance that he’d come busting into my house to find me playing “Hide The Paycheck” with SkipMagic), I don’t think I’d be too upset. I’d be kind of touched that he cared. YMMV.

12

But she was supposed to be back TODAY.

I just checked my email to see what’s sitting around.

My boss would realize I’m a running freak that gets LOTS of emails about scheduled runs, and that on Tuesday night I’m going to be making a carrot & red pepper salad to take to a potluck.

:smiley:

13

I can’t help but wonder why this woman still has a job!

Our secretary has a list with an emergency contact for each of us. I assume if we didn’t show up or call in, the boss would start with that list. I can’t imagine he’d go beyond that.

As an aside: I did have as coworker who was reliable a clockwork, but one day, he didn’t show up or call. The boss called him. The coworker was diabetic and he’d goofed up with his insulin (I think he did too much work in his yard and didn’t eat enough) - luckily, the phone call woke him up and he was able to get himself back in balance. And since then, he’s gotten married, so we don’t have to fret about him any longer.

14

. . . and the thing is, Ferret Herder, that according to the calendar she was supposed to be back today.

But the other thing is, she does this all the time. I actually asked my boss if he knew of any reason why we should consider this incident any different from the gazillion other times she’s done this (and turned out to be alive and well).

But, as I said, the one time we fail to worry is things go all anus on us.

15

Plus, this woman has had major health problems in the past (or at least has claimed to have those problems), so had I been the boss, I probably would have checked her apartment, too. As auntie em said in an e-mail to me, what if this had been the one time they gave up on her and she turned out to be sitting on the bathroom floor, trying to hold together that anus auntie em almost wrote about?

16

Ack, I missed that! Sorry, I thought she had just gone on vacation, not that she was late returning. In that case, that’s more reasonable - I’ve read various cases in the newspaper about someone not coming in to work, people checking the house/apartment, and finding them injured/dead of natural causes/murdered.

17

Webmail accounts fall under the rules of Internet surfing. You can have whatever you want in your webmail accounts. If you receive porn in those accounts, however, you should not open those email messages at work.

Here’s something scary. I have the power to watch your every move, as if I was standing over your shoulder, without you even knowing I’m on your machine.

I’m very ethical, however, and have never abused this power.

18

I don’t think it’s very unusual for the boss to go checking in this situation. I’ve a history of (verified) illness and if I don’t show or call/email by 10 am, the calls start coming. First call house, then hubby, then the threat of a drive-by, etc. until confirmation.

My ex-boss, single/lives alone, made sure I had his number, his mom’s number, everyone’s cell number, and that I knew where a key could be found… just in case. He said he didn’t want his critters to die if something happened and he wasn’t found for several days. Ick - not exactly written out in the employee handbook. But I’m glad that he has that much trust in me.

Why? Because we had a co-worker who didn’t come to work one day… and wasn’t found for several days. Not what you ever want to happen to a friend. You just don’t know what can happen.

That being said, he should have had the manager check the apartment alone. Just to see if there was anything amiss. He should have waited outside.

19

FairyChatMom, all I can say is you don’t know. You just don’t know how much she gets away with around here, and it would take too long to try to tell you. (Hell, I talk to SkipMagic every day, and there are STILL stories he hasn’t heard! Not that we spend all of our time talking about my coworker, but I think it’s safe to say that he’s quite familiar with my Daily Drama, yet he has not yet plunged the deepest depths of the Coworker Archives.) My mom seriously believes that this coworker must have some major dirt on my boss to still have this job!

Case in point: She once went MIA on the day of a–nay, the–Super Duper Big Deal Very Important Meeting of the Year (which, I might add, cost 40 bucks per person to attend), without any sort of notification at all.

When she showed up the next day, she told a fantastic tale of having gotten lost on the way home from another city here in Kansas (60 miles away), and wound up in Iowa. At which point her cell phone stopped working. So she stopped at a gas station and begged the people there (customers and employees alike) to let her borrow one of their cell phones to call us, but they all refused on the basis of her race.

I asked her why she hadn’t just used the payphone to call us, if she was at a gas station.

She said that she was so upset she hadn’t thought of it.

So yeah. Some days I wonder what it would take to get fired around here (which gives me hella job security, because all I do is spend each day secretly putzing around on the SDMB . . . )!

DeVena, I’m not sure my boss DID go into her apartment himself, but at any rate, he said she wasn’t there.

At this point we’re out of ideas.

20

Although I would probably not do this with any of the accounts for the guys who work for me, I don’t feel it is wrong.

I have nothing in my office email that I would be embarassed if my boss saw, except for the occasional boss bashing (but I bust his stones to his face, so he wouldn’t be surprised.) Office email is for the office. Private stuff I have sent to my home account.