Phase two: Keep your job

Don’t blog (duh)

A financial analyst was telling everyone about her blog. Not that it matters, but she was getting paid, like, real money. She had a career. But…she was bored. So she started blogging from work and was always online, which irritated her coworkers. Never underestimate the ability of someone you think is your friend to turn you in when they’re working their butts off and you’re not. Once her boss found out about it—this might have gone better had she not used her real name and called him some incredibly interesting things—he got a little pissed that he was being characterized as a buffoon and went to HR, whereupon we began reading the blog.

As you hear on 20/20, yes, we do have the ability to pull up all your activity. We can have someone mirror your monitor so we can just sit and watch. Which we did. Her blog was super funny. That girl could write. On the one hand we were like, You know what, we all have to be thick-skinned in this new world order. But our concern was when the hell was she getting all this done? Some of her post times were like, “Really? Were you doing this during a conference call?” She continued blogging about how bored she was and how ridiculous everyone was and how much she hated her job. We were like, Don’t worry, we’ll solve that. Finally we were able to point out that she was doing a lot of this at work. She took the blog offline and we fired her. We fired her not because she called her boss a blithering idiot, but because it was at work.

It’s interesting—as a nation of people who are pissed at the thought of having a national ID card, we feel that we have the right to live off the grid. In reality, there is nothing in the Constitution that guarantees you a damn bit of privacy—unless you live in California, where article one, section one [of the state constitution] says you can have private files. Every employer—and especially a private employer—has the right to monitor everything you do at work. Everything. And most companies with half a computer and a dollar can have someone sitting around in a department you didn’t really know existed, watching in real time what you’re doing.

—As told to Kate Lowenstein by an executive for a Fortune 100 company