Using the Internet at Work (Long and boring)

I post here from work most of the time (including this time). My company has the ability to be very “Big Brother” and it is no secret. They keep a log of your phone activity and send it to your supervisor every month. The IT dept can and does occasionally read the content of emails sent using the company mail system. In the case of email, they have sent out occasional warnings and reminders that nothing unprofessional or personal should be sent using the company mail. They have a filter in place that blocks any email containing any vulgar language. So we all Yahoo or whatever instead for personal email. No big deal. We have Websense or something that blocks websites that use profanity as well. I am not quite sure how that works, because SDMB doesn’t get censored but some other things have. They also keep a record of internet activity. I THOUGHT that this was done just like the phone records – where they send the monthly list to your supervisor. I am not a supervisor over anyone so I can’t say first hand. When I have asked others who are supervisors, they were noncommittal in answering me, but led me to believe that someone was looking at it regularly.

My immediate supervisor is a great guy. He also surfs the Internet for personal stuff at work from time to time. He has caught me on The Straight Dope and outright told me he didn’t mind, because he knows I only do so during very slow times or on my breaks. I put in more than 40 hours a week and generally give the company my best. It does not affect my performance and it was ok with him. As such, I will usually leave the SDMB open on my PC all day and pull up a thread here and there when I get the chance. I have done this for months without getting in trouble for it, so I thought it was OK.

Yesterday I found out that monthly records are NOT sent to the supervisors. Although they have the ability to pull your history, they haven’t been, unless they were suspicious in the first place. However, the HR Director is now going through the records. He fired someone yesterday because of their activity. My supervisor told me this. I don’t know if it was quality or quantity that got him fired, just that this is going on and people are getting fired over it. My supervisor said he is staying off the Internet as much as possible and he suggests I do the same.

I feel betrayed. I don’t mind my supervisor seeing my activity, but I am concerned and upset that this is up to the HR director alone. He does not know me well. He is not the kind of person who would appreciate the SDMB, to put it mildly. If he sees not only addresses but duration, it will look like I do nothing but sit on the Internet all day. Plus, I have been goatsed a couple of times in the last month or two (goatsed = following someone else’s link and inadvertently ending up somewhere not work safe), one of which was just on Monday. So if he does see duration, then at least he will see that I left as soon as possible when I ended up somewhere I didn’t want to be. If he doesn’t, then I have a couple of non-work safe addresses in my history. No pay sites or anything, but a couple with explicit photos.

To speak in a metaphor, Internet use at work is like speeding. Everybody does it to some degree and the authorities usually look the other way if you keep it reasonable. I feel like my favorite stretch of road that the cops never bothered, where I could always glide along at 10 miles over the limit without worry has been videotaped this whole time and now, a year later, they are going to hand me 10 tickets all at once and suspend my license. I feel like my cop friend who used to let me get away with stuff was fired and some cop with a chip on his shoulder is now cracking down in his stead and I had no idea until after the new cop stopped me. Yes, I knew they were keeping track of it. Yes, I should not have been here so much, but I thought it was being monitored all along and by no one saying anything to me, that what I was doing was ok. They have not sent out notices reminding you to behave on the Internet the way they have with email. They haven’t officially posted the two fired this week, either – implying there will be more, so they might as well wait and announce them all at once. (There are only about 200 people who work here, so when anyone is hired or leaves the company, HR posts it on the bulletin board. They never say why, but do say, “so and so has left the company and we wish them the best in their future endeavors”.)

I realize that I am probably not going to get fired. I went and read the Employee charter thing and it is vague enough that I have not violated it obviously. Everyone here does it to some degree. I am guessing the guy who got fired was going to blatantly nasty websites. If they fire me over this, they will have to fire at least half the company. But it just sucks. I like my job and I am good at it. I can get stuff done quickly – I have never missed a due date for my projects. It should be up to your supervisor, not the HR director. If it is quantity, which is what I am worried about, then they should warn first and give you a chance to fly straight, rather than going straight to firing.

As far as posting this, I figure if visiting the SDMB is going to get me fired, one more thread isn’t going to make a difference.

Thanks for reading this – just needed to get that off my chest.

Do you really think they would fire you without first weighing your value to the company and the amount of work you do otherwise? I think you’ll be fine. I’m in a similar situation. The entire office (about 30 people) got an email stating that internet usage was prohibited because it takes focus away from work blah blah blah. I’m not too worried about this. I’m one of the few people in my office (I do admin stuff for a local software company) that isn’t a total fuckup and my boss knows it. My advise would be to ease up a bit on the websurfing until it blows over.

P.S. - I wrote my reply from work too! :slight_smile:

At work we have a procedure for dealing with this sort of thing: if you accidentally receive or bring up something contrary to the Acceptable Use Policy (e.g. you receive a porno email), you report it to security. The incident is then logged and if you get auditted the log is checked.

Sometimes companies will keep logs of stuff so that if they want to get rid of a certain person or a certain number of people they can peruse the logs and find an excuse to fire them. Don’t know if that’s true in your case, of course. Hope everything turns out well for you.

Our office administrator, a rabid control freak bitch if e’er there was one, occasionally decides to “get” someone at random, so proceeds to start inspecting their email, phone, and internet usage. I wouldn’t object if it weren’t so damnably random. One of our hardest workers, who’s been there for several years, recently had all her personal emails printed out for the last several months, waved in her face while she was being screamed at, told that if she so much as received one personal phone call – even from a family member, even in an emergency – she’d be fired, and was cut off from her internet use altogether. And she’s one of the folks in the office who got online the least! What a crock.

Of course, that’s also why I’ve been out looking for another job – and just got a great offer today. So as of Monday morning she’ll be my soon-to-be-ex-office administrator and I’ll surf the SDMB from work if I want to, which I haven’t done up till now just because we were told “no message boards, ever,” and I really don’t want to give her any more ammunition to hate me. (Which she already does since I won’t buy into her bullshit – I just ignore her.) And all her idiotic little rules be damned. I’m a hard worker, too, don’t abuse the pathetically crappy network or ridiculously and impossibly antiquated computers (a busy legal office running on Pentium 1s? Riiiight…), don’t sit on the phone 6 hours a day like other folks there yakking with friends and relatives, aren’t subscribed to ten million email lists, get all my personal email at my home email address, and have given them NO reason not to trust me – but you can’t reason with people who aren’t reasonable.

I hope your HR director at least talks to your supervisor before doing something dumb!

One of our hardest workers, who’s been there for several years, recently had all her personal emails printed out for the last several months, waved in her face while she was being screamed at, told that if she so much as received one personal phone call – even from a family member, even in an emergency – she’d be fired, and was cut off from her internet use altogether. And she’s one of the folks in the office who got online the least! What a crock.

Find-a-new-job.

Find a new job, find a new job, find a new job, find a new job.

Been there, done that, milady. It sounds very much like a boss I used to have, a person who loved to micromanage, and did not CARE if your job was actually getting done, so long as slavish obedience was given to Management Directives. This one person managed to butcher an entire sales division, utterly destroying a damn good sales record, because he would rather the sales reps came to his little meetings, rather than get out there and sell stuff…

…and then, the drop in sales was OUR fault. So heads had to roll. He started with the most productive, since they were the most resentful of the crap festival.

You can see how this helped.

Get a new job, get a new job, get a new job… :frowning:

Thanks for all the stories, guys.

NOT posting from work this time :slight_smile: - I wish I could believe that they were just pulling this stuff as an excuse to get rid of problem people, but that isn’t the case. At least one of the two people that were fired this week was a decent contributor. He was good at his job. Aside from not having the initiative to find new projects when he finished what he was asked to do, he did well, yet they fired him anyway. He was in more of a grunt job where it should not be expected for him to have that kind of initiative, so they shouldn’t have been looking for an excuse to fire him just for that.

Generally, it is nearly impossible to get fired there. The maintenance director buys equipment on the company account, then takes it home for his side business company and it never comes back. Supposedly his supervisor knows. Did he get fired? No! He got promoted! People grossly abuse the attendence policy and get away with it. In the same department where that guy got fired, there is someone else who is grossly unqualified for his job and his performance is terrible. It is a position that requires extreme attention to detail and decent memory or at least self-documenting, and he has/does neither. Has he been fired or at least moved into another position? No.

These things happen outside my department. My department is run fairly. It is all the other stuff around me that bothers me.

So my only comfort is that I am not in a grunt position - they would be hard-pressed to replace me - as it is, it took them 1.5 years to find me. I am currently working on a project that will save the company 30% of the shipping operations that will nose dive without me. So I try to take comfort in the thought that those things will protect me. But again, I don’t know that the HR director knows that stuff. My position is not well understood by others outside of my immediate contact and they think I do nothing.

Thinks2Much…

If they ask you to train someone on the stuff you’re doing “just for backup, in case you’re sick or something” GET OUT.

I got passed over for a promotion and THEN had to train the person they got instead of me in their job.

I don’t have to work yet (teeheeheeheeheehee), but at school I am in computers class, and after we finish a project, we can surf the web. Now my school has a firewall, and it blocks out a ton of stuff, but not the Straight Dope! Eaither they haven’t found it, or it is considered fine. I was reading a recent Cecil article,(this was before I found the SDMB) and my teacher came up and read it too. She said she liked the article, and moved on. Some people are way to highstrung. If you do your work, and just surf on breaks or slow times it’s fine. I am good at computers, and normaly I finish during the first day, so I get the entire week to surfing the net (YAY!) Some people just need to take a chill pill. :rolleyes: