Cyberslacking

The new technology gives bosses Orwellian powers to see everywhere you've been and read everything you've written, including embarrassingly personal e-mails. "It's very borderline in what all of us fear about Big Brother and technology," admits Jeff Uslen, information-protection manager at 20th Century Fox. After scripts from "The X-Files" began showing up on eBay before they were broadcast on TV, the Hollywood studio hired Uslen for the newly created job (his license plate reads cyberfuzz). He quickly installed Message Inspector software that monitors all of the studio's e-mail traffic to make sure no more scripts wander off and to block hate mail from reaching its stars' e-mail boxes.

Companies have more to worry about than overly opinionated David Duchovny fans. This year Xerox has fired more than 40 employees for allegedly mixing particularly perverse pleasures with business. The workers idled away up to eight hours a day on pornography Web sites, according to Xerox. Some even downloaded porn videos that choked Xerox's expansive computer network, preventing their co-workers from opening or sending e-mail. "There were people spending all solid day doing nothing but clicking the mouse and downloading pictures," says Xerox cybercop Mike Gerdes, who runs the company's eight-member SWAT team on computer abuse. Gerdes's cyberpatrol rooted out the pornophiles with the help of new snooping software that allows Xerox to review every Web site its 40,000 computer users visit each day. According to Gerdes, most slacking occurs on less sexy sites, like eBay and E*Trade. But porn addresses tend to stand out on his activity reports, he says. "When someone is hanging out at 'XXX I'm having a great time at the company's expense.com,' that's easy to identify."

Some companies have barred the door to pornography by installing special filtering software to prevent employees from entering adult areas. Yet many, including Xerox, still allow employees to occasionally cruise the Web and send e-mail for more benign personal use. "To tell an employee that they can't respond to an e-mail from their kid in college just doesn't make sense," says Gnazzo at United Technologies. But a few employers, such as telecommunications giant Ameritech, have a zero-tolerance policy for any personal use of e-mail or the Internet.

Workers tend to chafe under such rigidity, particularly if companies use intrusive methods to check up on them. Kate Atkinson, for one, was startled when she says a nasty e-mail from her company flashed on her screen at work, reprimanding her for visiting eBay recently. A family doctor who works 60 hours a week for a Belchertown, Mass., health-care company, Atkinson went on eBay to buy her kids a Foosball table because she was too busy to make it to the store. She says the "strongly worded" company e-mail warned her she could be fired for cruising the Internet from work. "I felt like I was back in first grade and the teacher thought I was cheating," fumes Atkinson. "Come on, it's a Foosball table--and I'm a doctor." She ignored the threat and completed her purchase.

Not every boss views the Internet as the enemy. At Vantage One, a Cleveland Web-design firm, employees have Quake-Offs using the bloody online war game to kill stress and each other (virtually, of course). Explains Jim Wilson, a 31-year-old programmer, "There is something therapeutic about being able to drop into a full, 3-D interactive environment and see how long you last." Wilson's bosses encourage slacker bonding in the office, provided the work eventually gets done. "As long as it's not offensive to others around you and doesn't impede your work, then anything goes," says Vantage One cofounder Dan Rose, who admits to slacking off on ESPN.com.

Game playing has become a fact of workplace life. One in five online game players logs on from work, according to a survey by the Interactive Digital Software Association. Jay Severson, a 22-year-old computer programmer in San Jose, Calif., spent so much of his workday playing Starcraft he became a world champion and even scored an endorsement deal from a gaming-mouse company. But with his day job suffering, Severson is now trying to quit playing Starcraft--for the third time. "Once you love a game, it almost always interferes with your work," he shrugs. "You won't stop at a loss. And when you win, you keep on playing because you're on a roll." Severson, who works from home, has a powerful incentive to quit playing games. His bosses at EUniverse, while tolerant of some surfing, are monitoring his productivity more closely. "Now that the corporation is looking over my shoulder, it almost defeats the purpose of working at home," he says.