I was out of the office pretty much all of last week. The doc-in-a-box assured me that, although it might feel like strep, it was not, in fact, strep. I spent the week subsisting almost entirely on hot and sour soup, and popsicles. I slept on the couch so my sniffling, coughing, and bitching wouldn’t keep Alpha Geek awake.
All of which is just to let you know that a week went by in which I was not reading the office e-mails. All the interesting stuff was waiting for me Monday when I got back.
E-mail from the boss, to everyone: He’s noticed that some of us are spending a lot of time on the internet doing personal things. He had hoped we’d cut it out, but we didn’t, so now he’s installed monitoring software to keep track of how much time we spend on non-work-related sites.
My first thought: is it me? I do keep a tab open to my personal Gmail account throughout the day. But I also keep a tab open to my work Gmail account with Second Company. And now and then I do check the local news site to see what’s going on with the weather.
New Girl apparently sent a reply to the effect of, “Sure, you’re the boss, that’s your prerogative.”
Boss replied, to everyone except Freda: “Actually this was just meant for Freda, she’s the one I think is spending too much time on personal internet stuff.”
O_O
Okay.
I don’t want to be the office snitch, or get myself involved in shit if I don’t have to.
But.
I really have a problem with this style of management. If I’m doing something wrong, I would prefer the boss tell me—me, specifically and individually—”Hey, I don’t like you doing this thing.” A general e-mail to everyone is going to leave people thinking “I don’t think I’m doing this thing. It must be someone else.”
I’m thinking I should give Freda a quiet heads-up about it. Probably it will be obvious I’m the one who said something to her, because we work pretty closely together. And once I tell her, she will go talk to the boss about it. She won’t tell him how she found out, but it’ll be pretty obvious she heard from her little protégé.
But if everyone was saying shit about me, I’d want to know about it. And Freda has certainly been looking out for me while I’ve worked there.
Dammit, just when it seemed like the drama had all died down.