It's a Universal Thing!

A handsome male employee works in an office in this undated photo.

What on earth do you think you’re doing now?

Don’t you feel the slightest guilt of using office time and resources to check on this blog? and to gawk at the good looking fella shown in the picture while at it?

If you answer NO to the above question, chances are (given that you are probably an American) you could well be the top 60 % of no-good employee your organization has mistakenly hired.

Now, do I get your attention?

Yesterday I ran across an article over the Internet that caught my attention. It’s about an interesting-but-hardly-shocking finding from an online survey conducted on American employees. The findings reported that about six in every ten workers admit to wasting time at work, with average employee wasting 1.7 hours of a typical 8.5 hour working day.

Sounds not too distance away huh? Wait until you hear this. ‘Personal Internet use’ topped the list as the leading time-wasting activity (34%) followed closely by ‘socializing with co-workers’ (mengular in our local term) by 20.3 percent.

And the real reasons for that? Hardly earth shattering revelation. 18 per cent of the respondents listed ‘boredom and not having enough to do’ as the main reason for this horrible misfortune and blamed ‘too long hours’ (13.9 percent) as next main factor for these helpless workers to go bad.

Now that we’re talking business, I must say I found this article quite enlightening.

Wasting time at work is no longer an Asian thing like I thought it was. Suddenly I feel like I am not alone anymore in this world. I am no longer feel like an inept employee of my organization. I can now stand tall and feel guided. I have my reasons now.

And so what I did was, immediately after I read it, I printed the article using the ever-dependent office printer and clipped it nicely in my personal file. Someday someone will question my integrity and I will smugly shove her this and say ‘see boss, it’s a universal thing you can’t blame me on something that already in our human DNA. I never did anything wrong. I just got bored and decided to get my own entertainment’.

Of course, that ‘someday’ won’t come anytime soon – or never, but my conscience is clear: I will only turn into the ‘dark side’ if my boss is not around.

And she is on leave today.