I blog from work and just hope that my not blogging at all *about* work and meeting my goals helps them overlook it. Because, good lord, I would go freaking postal if I didn't have some surreptitious outlet during work hours (presumably, they've guessed this already).

one of the reasons i work for my 5 person company is that there is no one to watch me. i AM the IT department (which is scary). on the other hand, when no one's paying attention, i can spend 7 out of an 8 hour day blogging and commenting and surfing and not do anything but answer the phone. sometimes i rationalize it by arguing that hey - it's all the time i've spent bloggin and surfing that's enabled me to be the company webmistress and billable as a web designer for clients.

so obviously, i would be so, SO much more productive if someone were monitoring how much time i spend surfing compared to working on spreadsheets, and so from a productivity and efficiency point of view, i totally understand, and maybe agree with, companies who do this.

the thing is, there's little motivation to do all your work as fast as you can. they just give you more work. the optimal thing for desk jockeys would be that everyone would have a pre-defined workload at the beginning of a week, and if you finished your designated 40-hour workload, you could go home. if it takes you 20 hours, fine. go home early on wednesday and enjoy your weekend. if it takes you 40, that's expected. i know i'd do all my work as quickly as possible so i could go home and blog. but that's not how it works, so instead the companies are investing in who know how many dollars worth of tracking software to monitor work productivity so that they can find ways to get you do to more work.

i need to get out from behind my desk.

My company policy is also that all is being watched. But as there are over 300,000 employees - they'd already have to be pretty pissed at me to really be able to focus on what I do.

I also don't EVER name my employer by name - when I must rant about work I call it the Evil Empire and my particular office is the Western Outpost of the Evil Empire. My co-workers are Minions of Evil and my bosses are Boss Minions of Evil.

I use a series of what I consider reasonable precautions: I use a pseudonym, I never mention my company or anyone associated with it by name, and I lie about certain key details in order to create plausible deniability. Otherwise I operate on the assumption that my sysadmin could be watching me-- but why would they bother?

There was a period of about 9 months when there was someone in upper admin who really had it in for me. During that time I blogged less and I used one of the Dwarf Lord's proxy servers for all my personal web surfing. If someone had chosen to monitor my usage during that time they would have known I was up to something, but they wouldn't have been able to see which sites I was visiting.

The funny thing is, all this is becoming moot. WiFi signals are so ubiquitous that I can just set my personal laptop up next to my desktop and ride a signal I pick up from somewhere else in the neighborhood. I also play music off my laptop, so if anyone looks in on me, I'm just listening to (stolen) MP3s.

welp, my first day on this job, The Big Boss sent everyone a link to an elf bowling game he'd found on-line. sooo, i intuited they don't reeeally care too much around here about that sort of thing.

'cause i'm insightful like that.

every other Real job i've ever had, i had to sign some sort of compy-loyalty oath, yes, but being a practical anarchist, i then just went ahead and did what i wanted.

would've welcomed being fired from those jobs anyway.