A'nold wrote:romothesavior wrote:ScaredWorkedBored's dad is a BADASS!!!
Dickhead.
Seriously, all you people thinking dude's dad's actions were even REMOTELY rational need to "grow up" or at least the people you work for. My bosses invite my wife to come to the office all the time and we bring our baby in to see everyone. No one gives a crap what you do with your time as long as you produce. Geesh. I though micro-managing like that was only for retail workers at Sears or entry level AP clerks....
This is why it's good to have some idea of the office culture of the place where you work. Your boss doesn't care about personal activity. That's honestly relatively unusual. Other bosses will terminate you as a matter of company policy if their computer audit shows non-work use to any degree. Nevermind doing anything in person on company time...
Company time = company resources. Not all employers go ballistic over it (although all will eventually whack someone they consider lazy, it's just a matter of how long...), but something to the degree of what the OP is talking about is an entirely different deal than "Bob likes to hang out at the watercooler." It's heightened in a law firm because of secrecy & a direct time=$$$ calculation, but no one is going to like unscheduled 20 minute breaks & similar. You'll be fired for that if you didn't clock out at hourly employment because, guess what, you're bilking the employer. If you are salaried, you are automatically bilking the employer. They do not like this. And TBH, you know that's what you're doing.
In the case of Skywalk Romeo, it was considered an unacceptable lack of discipline. Leaving your work area without permission because you "needed" to go cuddle with someone and then defending it like you had some moral right to do so is what most people would consider an "attitude problem." The corporates he pissed off had a very low tolerance for attitude problems and didn't consider whatever value he may have added as an employee over the baseline work at his job to be worth letting this sort of thing go. So they let him go instead.
Incidentally, more graduated punishments tend to be found in government or union shops. All "employee handbooks" at private, non-union companies state that you can be flat terminated at any time for any or no reason. So yeah, you
do live on notice that this sort of thing can happen to you.
Speculating about permissive workplaces is not relevant because the OP, in what I'm sure is a huge surprise, does not work in one. It's also an incredibly dangerous assumption if you don't have express permission to be, well, lazy so long as work gets done. Your boss works to make money just as much as you do. It's almost always in his interest that you work your ass off. One way or another, his ass depends on yours being productive.
If this is really surprising to you, you probably should reconsider your choice in profession. OP is severely unprofessional for working in a large firm. They are basically businesses. And at any size firm, that sort of time wasting leads to overbilling. Which leads to either your being dismissed when someone catches on or you getting in ethical hot water when your client (or an ethics enforcer-inclined supervisor) catches on.
