workingfortheman.com

For the common working man, we are always entrenched in a battle at work: co-worker vs. co-worker, copy machine vs. co-worker, computer vs. co-worker, and the most obvious, boss with his head up his ass vs. the working man. With the emergence of the Internet, employees have found new ways to screw around at work while on the company clock. Unfortunately, the downside of the Internet is the slow speed of minimizing along with the constant looking over your shoulder. Secondly, you can only refresh your personal email account so many times a day. It was the birth and growth of Instant Messaging into a worldwide network that would easily solve both these problems. Whether your poison is AOL, Yahoo, MSN, or ICQ, all of these allow a person to chat with others who also have the same program installed on their machine. What else could you ask for? A tiny box on your screen that is easily hidden and the opportunity to catch up and waste time with your after-hours drinking buddies. But before you start going on a crusade to recruit every Tom, Dick, and Harry on IM, hear my story. It was my zealous desire to spread IM to all fun-loving procrastinating co-workers that robbed me of what came to be my saving grace.

As a member of the "disgruntled group" at work, I invited a few other co-workers to join my IM list. Once I got them over the fear of getting fired, they were instantly addicted. It started out as a chat here and there, then spilled into lengthy conferences, and eventually turned into having four or five conversations with different people. I honed my mouse and minimizing skills to pull myself out of danger at the first sign of managers. My typing skills increased tenfold as I would type faster and faster to keep up with all my conversations. My typing pace became so feverish and brisk that my boss would come by and say, "Nick, you're doing a hell of a job and you've got a kick-ass work ethic. Slow down, you don't wanna take my job so soon, do you?"

Little did the poor fool know that I was actually planning my happy hour and dinner plans for the evening. As Mr. T would say, "I pitied the fool." It was great. We would talk shit about the annoying co-worker in the cube next to us without the fear of being busted. He would make one of his "funny jokes" and my co-workers and I would deliver one of our well-rehearsed laughs. But immediately after these "jokes," the room would explode with the sound of mad keys typing away followed by an enormous burst of laughter by the IM crew. Naturally, the dork would assume the laughter was reminiscent of his crappy joke. Once again Mr. T comes to mind. The dork would ask what was so funny and of course our response was absolutely nothing. This excuse could only last a little while before the boss became a little suspicious. It was downhill from there. Questions arose, reports were late, projects were behind schedule, and there were simply no results to show for all the rapid, feverish typing going on. It was a quick demise. We got sloppy; we trusted the wrong people and got burned. We were too zealous about our mission. We invited the wrong people, the dorky people, and they ratted us out. Our normal emails from management chastising our Internet usage were supplemented with warnings against all forms of electronic conversations. One of my partners in crime had to face a humiliating exit from the company being cited for a lack of productivity and abusing the company's "computer usage policy." What a way to go! It was getting too hot and risky with the manager finally catching on one year later. I had to stop logging in. I was emotionally devastated and had to re-assimilate into the corporate culture. I began talking shit about my employees at the water cooler again, instead of on IM.

I will never regret my IMing days. It brought me closer to people I never thought I would be friends with. Just being online at the same time would make it all the more appealing to start up a conversation. It was the common desire of wasting time on the clock that formed a foundation that I built numerous friendships on. As I wish this ultimate fate on no disgruntled employee, heed the following advice: be careful of who you trust when choosing your IM buddies. Although you may be anxious to waste time at work, type slow like you would any memo or report so that your boss can't decipher what you're actually doing. Finally, if you are in the position where every time you make a comment, it's followed by silence, mad typing, and laughter by your coworkers, realize that they are laughing at you, so don't be so damn naive.

Nagesh is still disgruntled and employed in Houston, Texas. After a very brief hiatus from IM, he has installed the latest version of Yahoo Messenger on his machine at work.

Back to the archives.

Return to the main page.