I'M FREE
Loyal reader and friend Jim Chadwick just commented that it had been a while since I had posted here, and he's right.
When Lent came, I promised I wouldn't do a bunch of things, as I often do (lapsed Catholic though I may be). One was to spend an excess of time online. Trying not to post from the office and stuck with my slow dialup connection at home, I found myself making copious notes of things about which I wanted to comment, but not enough time.
Then, two weeks ago, I was asked to stop coming back to the office. That was so startling I didn't know what to do about it for a few days, and I had nothing clever to say here about it.
I still don't, really. Here's the irony: I was trying not to go to the Internet from the office, but was fired for spending too much time on the Internet. Oh, and by the way, my job involved web work. My employer did have spy software installed on my computer, so he could view what I was doing, and he offered some Googling I was doing after I'd discovered images could be Googled. (Perish forbid, Rebecca Romijn of X-Men!) He was determined to let me go, and I was not in a mood to fight for my job -- I took it for fun and was having less and less of it -- so it's probably "all good" (as the young folks say) for everyone.
So... if you need someone to write any marketing materials, advertising, direct mail, or similar, let me know. Otherwise, I'll be sitting home during the day, using the spouse's slightly faster dialup connection, looking for work.
My other advice is this: Employers are going to more and more be spying on what you do with their equipment. Mirroring your computer screen, listening in on telephone conversations, going through your desk drawers. They have a right to do so; it's all their stuff. But ultimately that's the kind of management that's going to result in a staff just not committed to doing its job. At least, in my humble opinion.
3 comments:
Holy crap. That's pretty godawful. Sorry to hear it. Here I am, going on about my work stuff and I had no idea this had happened ot you. You are being much more philosophical about it than I would be. The temptation to go online at the office, even when the warnings are there, is sometimes tough especially when trying to fight boredom. I tried refraining from doing anything too incriminating on my last job, though towards the end when I had my suspicions about how it was all going to end, I was less concerned. As you say, it's certainly an employer's perogative. But just as employers are concerned about their employees' productivity, I often question if whatever sort of benefit they get out of monitoring online activity at the office is worth the investment of time it takes to actually have someone policing this sort of thing. One wonders why, for example, it might take an IT personnel a week to around to fixing a technical problem that would allow a person to better function at their job, even though they seem to have time to scrutinize the details of what that person has been Googling.
Those freaking jerks. If I hadn't given up swearing just this afternoon, I would have worse things to say. Do you suppose they have spyware on everyone's machine? Well, I hope they enjoyed my little forays into cyberspace.
It's amazing to me the new lows in morale they have created, and continue to create, in that place. So much for my efforts to instill a little "TASC spirit". Bah, humbug.
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