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.
