You know your end users are up to something. Some may stretch the company’s acceptable Internet use policy — researching their fantasy football picks for a few minutes, checking their hockey pool standings online, researching shoe purchases, that sort of thing. You know, the stuff I don’t do if our IT head honcho, Mat, is reading this.
Some of the most brazen violations:
* One engineer was receiving proprietary data from his firm’s competition. Turns out he was actually doing work for them on the side.
* You know there’s going to be porn on this list. One employee was not only downloading porn; he (although it’s an anonymous story, we all know it’s a guy) only put in 12 minutes of work in an eight-hour day.
* Speaking of not putting in the time, one woman was busted for playing solitaire for four hours a day. That’s the kind of slacking that would exhaust a normal person.
* A county jail guard was caught — not just by monitoring, but also on video — deleting all the icons on a shared workstation’s desktop before leaving at the end of shift. Despite the evidence, he denied it. Turned out to be his get-out-of-a-jail-job-free card.
* Then there was the woman seemed to be spending an awful lot of time on Craig’s List. The anonymous IT guy tells the story best, so we’ll let him: “To my complete surprise, it was’t furniture she was selling, but herself! She had even e-mailed illicit photos of herself to her ‘prospects.’ And all from her work computer! Needless to say, she was ‘escorted’ out that same day.”