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How Important is the Internet to Your Sanity at Work?
As you might remember, I'm kind of stuck in a rut doing document review jobs. It's easy to get stuck in this rut, because this kind of work is probably the fastest growing employment area in large cities for lawyers who were not the Case Notes Editor for the Harvard law Review. I'm trying all sorts of ways to get a more traditional legal job, but I won't bore you with that.
Doing these document review projects consists of sitting at a desk for long hours, paging through documents provided to answer discovery requests. You have to decide whether the document is responsive or non-responsive, and, if it's responsive, you have to decide whether it's privileged and, if so, why. You end up sitting at your desk for twelve to fifteen hours a day reading power point presentations of why Company X thinks they might get away without paying State Y its fair share of state income tax, or why Company A thinks its acquisition of Company B does not violate any antitrust laws.
The pay is not bad (some people make more than $100K per year - but they work their butts off), but the lawyers for the firm make sure you know your place and you can't really talk to anyone. So, the internet can be a great friend. You can listens to podcasts, streaming radio, check your email, all the usual internet stuff.
The problem is many firms are beginning to fix their computers so that you can't access the internet from your desk. The last three projects I've done have not allowed us any internet access at all. Like many things, you don't realize how much you rely on it until it's gone. A twelve hour stretch of reading dull documents can seem interminable if you can't take an internet break. Some firms are even beginning to disallow iPods and headphones.
Can you access the internet from your work? Are you allowed to look at everything? Would your work be worse without it?
P.S. - I definitely won't be doing this forever. There's been some loud talk about shipping this kind of work to India and China for nearly as long as I've been doing it.
Doing these document review projects consists of sitting at a desk for long hours, paging through documents provided to answer discovery requests. You have to decide whether the document is responsive or non-responsive, and, if it's responsive, you have to decide whether it's privileged and, if so, why. You end up sitting at your desk for twelve to fifteen hours a day reading power point presentations of why Company X thinks they might get away without paying State Y its fair share of state income tax, or why Company A thinks its acquisition of Company B does not violate any antitrust laws.
The pay is not bad (some people make more than $100K per year - but they work their butts off), but the lawyers for the firm make sure you know your place and you can't really talk to anyone. So, the internet can be a great friend. You can listens to podcasts, streaming radio, check your email, all the usual internet stuff.
The problem is many firms are beginning to fix their computers so that you can't access the internet from your desk. The last three projects I've done have not allowed us any internet access at all. Like many things, you don't realize how much you rely on it until it's gone. A twelve hour stretch of reading dull documents can seem interminable if you can't take an internet break. Some firms are even beginning to disallow iPods and headphones.
Can you access the internet from your work? Are you allowed to look at everything? Would your work be worse without it?
P.S. - I definitely won't be doing this forever. There's been some loud talk about shipping this kind of work to India and China for nearly as long as I've been doing it.
Comments
As a medical biller, I am basically at my desk all day long reviewing patient encounters and sending out bills. It's not a dream job, however it's fairly easy with challenges along the way, and I am rarely bothered. So I get to put on my iPod and just type away for most of the day. I am frequently caught Alt+Tabbing between work and the internet, however as long as I get work done, my boss is cool.
As for site access, I work for the government. You can pretty much guess that a lot of websites are blocked. >.< This makes me sad because most of the stuff that is linked on here, I can't see till I get home. I can go ahead and list many of the awesome sites that I like to frequent that are blocked:
Penny Arcade
You Tube
Google Video
Photobucket
Flickr
Livejournal
I'm very grateful that I still have certain sites that should be blocked, however, I hope and pray that they never find out about it. Basically, the internet is vital to me at work, because when I'm at home, I really don't care to be sitting at a computer for the rest of night, especially since I spend 8 hours at a computer at work.
I don't work fourteen hour days most days, but I still don't want to work on a computer when I get home. It's to the point where I even rarely game now unless it's a LAN thing. That may be changing soon with the new games and a new computer on the horizon.
Now it's time to get hypothetical. For the sake of discussion let us eliminate any occupation that is not a traditional desk job. If I were a police officer, pilot, race car driver, etc. the very idea of Internet access at work flies out the window. So we'll pretend that I have a desk job where the presence or absence of unfettered Internet access will not have any effect on the task at hand. If this were to be the situation, then I would say there are only two circumstances under which I would not quit immediately if I did not have unrestricted Internet access, freedom to use iPods, etc.
We've discussed this before, but it bears repeating until it is changed. In the US the vast majority of companies have this idea that they need all employees to sit at their desks for at least eight hours per day, five days per week. They even expect you to work overtime when asked, stay in contact with work during your vacation, and they give minimal vacation days. The time you spend in the office is more important to the employers than the actual work you do.
Remember the old job I quit? I spent time in an office in the middle of nowhere doing absolutely no work for months. Nobody noticed that I wasn't doing anything. My new job is significantly better, but not perfect. While I do a lot more work here, I spend significant amounts of time at work not working, and I still accomplish all the tasks my employer gives me. Barring strange weeks where everything goes crazy, and barring sudden catastrophes, I could complete my average weekly tasks in under twenty four hours.
I'm forced to stay in this office for forty hours each week, minimum, but I have less than twenty four hours of work to do. This leaves a lot of time doing absolutely nothing. At least with an Internet connection I can use this time to do things for myself. I can listen to podcasts, redesign web pages, write this forum post, play flash games, find news articles and things of the day, etc. If I was unable to do that, I would go insane from the sheer boredom of sitting at a desk with nothing to do for hours on end. I would, and have, quit such a job.
One condition where I would work a desk job with restricted Internet access is if I was only required to come into work when there was work to be done. If I could go home when tasks were completed, not show up to work when no new tasks were assigned, etc. I wouldn't care if I couldn't get on the net at work. I'd be spending maybe two days at work a week, and my entire time there I would be working with no opportunity for boredom. This includes telecommuting.
The other circumstance which I would not demand Internet access at work is if my employer actually gave me forty hours of work to do each week. If they won't let me leave, or telecommute, then they better give me work to do for every minute that I am in that office. If I'm working, and I don't need the net to work, what do I care if I have it or not?
However, this second circumstance is quite tricky. Unlike some people here, I absolutely, without exception, flat out refuse to work a nanosecond over forty hours a week. If I work an extra hour today because of a situation, I'm leaving an hour early on Friday. I'm not asking either, I'm telling. If the employer has a problem with that, I'll quit. If they assign me work that is not possible to complete by working only forty hours a week, then that is a failure of project management. It is not my problem, I don't care. They pay me for that amount of time, and that's all the time they are ever going to get. If the work doesn't get done because of my lack of effort or ability, I will take responsibility, but I still won't work overtime.
My time is worth a lot more to me than money. As long as I have enough money to take care of myself, I'm cool. The only time when more money becomes an incentive is when I am given so much money that I can significantly change my life. No employer will pay me that much money, because I'll quit immediately. I would trade a significant portion of my salary for more vacation days and time off.
So yeah. As long as I am forced to spent time sitting at a desk with nothing to do, I absolutely demand that I be given unrestricted Internet access so that I am not forced to take a significant and large portion of the limited time in my life and flush it down the toilet.
Another project was supposed to last six weeks and only lasted one. I got 93.5 hours for that one week.
The longest I've been without a project is three weeks (I couldn't have worked two of those anyway because I was sick), but when you never really know how long you'll be without work and you never really know how long your work will last when you have it, you have to get all the hours you can when you're working.
As of right now I get paid hourly because I'm fairly new. Soon enough I'll be salaried and get bonuses, sometimes big ones. I feel like a lot of our annual bonus covers this overtime. My overtime is almost a 10% bonus, only I get it on my paycheck. Next year I'll just get it in one lump sum at the end of the year. Considering the amount of money they pay, the amount of flexibility in the schedule (I work remote when issues or installs occur and usually at least one additional day a week), and the bonus pay, I guess I'm kind of OK with the strange hours. Once I get salaried, I'm really not sure if I will even work overtime, it'll just be strange hours sometimes.