Several people have lost their jobs after spending too much time on eBay while on the clock. What’s too much time? Well, these workers were spending up to two hours everyday on the site. Considering people typically work about 8 hours a day, two hours is a significant amount of time that clearly couldn’t be justified. While the Neath Port Talbot Council in South Wales where the people were employed allows employees to use the Internet during their own time like lunch breaks, they said that two hours of shopping and entertainment was unacceptable.
According to BBC "Union officials have blamed bosses for putting temptation in their way by allowing access to the Internet." They also said that people get "addicted" to certain web sites. Clearly the workers in this situation aren’t the only ones out there wasting company dollars while they browse web sites. In fact some of you may even be doing something similar, although maybe not to the same extent.
Many businesses rely on Internet to get work done, so eliminating it isn’t an option. What they can do though, and what many already do, is block access to certain sites like MySpace and Facebook.
Reader Question
Is the Internet a "temptation" for you while you’re at work? If so, what sites do you visit, and are you "addicted" to any of them? How long on average do you spend on the Internet at work doing something that’s not related to work?
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Tags: Web Sites, eBay, Facebook, MySpace
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I’d say it really depends. At my internship this summer I had time where I literally had nothing to do. so I spent a lot of time on Facebook, YouTube and webcomics. But when I had something to do, I’d say I spent 45 minutes doing non-work stuff. Sometimes it was to clear my head though.
The other thing is that all of those sites WERE blocked. I got around it through a remote desktop to one of my University’s servers. All they could tell was that I was talking to a computer in Iowa, unless they felt like sniffing packets and taking way more time that it’s worth.
Hard to say since my job involves the Internet. I’ll sometimes spend some time look at a customer’s site when we are slow. Especially in the evenings when 3rd shift comes on we can go 10-15 mintues between calls. I don’t have anything favourite though that I would go to. Oh and they do block MySpace which I discovered when I was checking to see if someone’s domain forwarding was working correctly.
A side note, the only place I do spend considerable time at is our own domain auction site. Especially on the ‘fire sale’ domains (those that have expired but we will try to get the registered before we turn them back over to the registry).
What are you going to do when you no longer have access to the university’s servers?
Have you picked up any domains when they’ve expired, or are employees not allowed to do that?