First complaining post about work

[locker_monster]

Well, that only took, what? Four days?

So the company I'm working for now is a small environmental company. They work with oil and gas companies, assessing the land where the companies want to build pipelines and what not. Since it's related to engineering, there are engineers employed and so by relation the work place is very relaxed. As nice as a small company is, there are also drawbacks.

For starters, they monitor everyone's e-mails. The boss frowns upon work e-mail being used for personal stuff. So I can't send e-mails to my friends or family. On top of that, any outside e-mail addresses are blocked. No G-mail, no hotmail, no yahoo. So no checking of the personal messages either. I'm fairly certain they also monitor all the sites I visit so no surfing the web when there's no work. Can't pop over to LJ without someone knowing.

I don't know if all small companies are like this. For sure, bigger companies don't care what their employees are doing. The big ones I worked for could care less about what I used my work e-mail for. I mean, I get that with smaller companies you only have so many people. If people are slacking off, productivity will be less. Still, I feel really cut off. I can't even e-mail my mother. A co-worker told me she got a stern talking to after she sent an e-mail to her mother.

But my cubicle is in a crappy spot anyway, so surfing the Internet was never an option. I'll miss checking out LJ between tasks though. You guys got me through some of the other boring jobs I had last summer.

Comments

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

That sucks. I'd rather companies monitor just internet usage by amount to make sure you're not overusing it while at work, rather than monitoring every thing you do.

[locker-monster.livejournal.com]

It seems like they can see everything I do. Good thing I only visited some sites and didn't post/e-mail anything. They told me today it's more of a security thing than playing Big Brother. Either they don't want viruses ending up on the mainframe or they're worried about people hacking their database. They have some big clients and the oil and gas industry is pretty heavy over here.

I think it's more of a small company thing. With bigger companies they don't have the capacity to monitor everyone and every place they visit. But god, I miss surfing the web, even on breaks. Is this a sign of an addiction? ;-)