Work Daze

I don’t want to make you any more paranoid than you already are, but if you suspect that someone is reading your every email, and tracking your every website visit, you’re probably right.

No, it’s not the FBI that has you under the electronic microscope. The Feds don’t care if you spend three hours a day tracking the latest antics of Britney and Lindsay on tmz.com and the rest of the time, selling the company’s office supplies on eBay. The person who has made it their business to be in your business is your boss. And the consequences of Big Brother Big Bothering you can be dire indeed.

According to the 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey from the nosey parkers at American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, over 50% of all employers fire workers for email and Internet abuse. Drill down and the percentages get every scarier. 66% of employers are monitoring your Internet connections. 45% are tracking your keystrokes. 40% of companies that monitor email actually assign an individual to manually read and review your private e-communications.

No wonder the economy is in such a tailspin. Businesses not only have taken their eye off the ball, they’re spending all their time keeping their eyeballs on your emails.

If this high level of corporate snoopitude is news to you, then you have no one but yourself to blame. Over 80% of the companies who eavesdrop into your private life at work claim to have notified their employees of their policies. This is absolutely no excuse since they probably made the notification in one of those snoozefest orientation meetings, or buried it in some HR manual you immediately interred in your file drawer.

One vexing statistic around all these e-terminations is that most seem to be based on the dubious moral judgments of your management. 64% of email offenses cite “inappropriate or offensive language.” Hey, what’s the sense of living in America if you can’t email a bud to vent, even if it the verbiage is deeply offensive, as in “my boss is a doo-doo head.”

The same “inappropriate /offensive content” excuse is also at the heart of 84% of Internet misuse terminations. This is nonsense. So what if you spend your days at www.saucypoodle.com, watching poodles dressed in frilly lingerie? At least, you’re at your computer. At least, you look like you’re working.

Besides, it’s not your fault if your company is not one of the 65% the AMA survey found that block connections to “inappropriate” websites. Like visiting your manager’s myspace page and learning that behind the harsh, focused, eye-of-the-tiger taskmaster who you see at work is a “macramé junky with a collection of over 500 Hummel figurines who loves to scrapbook.”

Keystroke tracking is another tool of the curious corporation. Apparently, anyone who uses more than 15 uppercase “Q’s” per month is a major security risk and must be fired immediately. [If you’re not sure if your company employs a keystroke counter, spend a morning at your workstation, idly entering asterisks. If no one comes running down from Mahogany Row demanding that you stop before they go crazy, you’re probably safe.]

If you think it’s safe to e-vent when you’re out of the office, you need a rethink – fast. 12% of the companies surveyed “monitor the blogosphere to see what is being written about the company.” I guess that means your “My Idiot Boss” blog could get you in trouble, even if you only write it during coffee breaks, and on the lunch hour, and all through the week-end, and while on vacation. If you haven’t been fired yet, it may be because your boss has not reached the end of first 3,000 pages.

My personal choice for the most awful outcome of all this spying and prying is the shocking revelation that many companies actually hire an individual to read the email of their employees. This practice does not alarm me because I don’t write incendiary emails to people within the company, and I don’t care what the office manager says, I was only kidding when I sent those two hundred emails suggesting I was going to fill her desk drawers with rabid weasels.

The problem with the official email reader is that these positions are hard to find. Talk about a dream job! What could better for born snoops like us than the opportunity to spend our days reading the electronic babblings of our psychotic co-workers and get paid for it?