It amazes me what some people will do on their computer at their workplace.

I’m not talking about watching cute puppy videos on company time, but things like watching videos that are not safe for work on their work computer.

Maybe they don’t understand that everything on a computer can be tracked.

This employee and the IT staff would have been the only ones who knew about what he had been watching if he’d kept his mouth shut.

Read on for yourself to see why he got his just desserts. I found it pretty satisfying.

Boss applies policy, employee gets mad, CEO rips employee a new one

Back in the early 2000s I was working for a local council in New Zealand. If you’re not aware, NZ has a central govt, and a series of local areas around cities or rural boundaries, each run by an elected Mayor and Council.

The day to day business is, of course, done by employees in a typical business structure.

One of the things about this is that all computer systems are regarded as being “owned” by the council, and kinda-sorta by the populace. It a member of the public wants to see what’s on the computers, they can make a request under the Official Information Act, and see pretty much anything, except private data. (Private data being defined by the Privacy Act as basically names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, etc.)

Also working in the council offices was a small business, that had an exclusive contract with the council. This group handled the more physical aspects of the council systems: maintenance of roads, sewer and water systems, etc. If the council said “we need a new pipe there”, this small business made it happen.

Finally, a time when a policy wasn’t annoying and made total sense!

Thing is, the Small Business leased (this is important) their computers from the council. The small I.T. team (three people, including me) built and supplied those machines. We owned the software that was on them, and they were connected to the internal council network. This meant they were subject to the same local govt and council policies as the rest of us.

Periodically, we in I.T. would clean out large files. (Early 2000s, when storage was expensive, and we were limited due to budget, etc.)

Now, the staff were fully aware of this, and knew to keep personal files to a minimum. If we, during a purge, found large personal files, we could delete them at our discretion.

During this time we found some… videos… on an SB employee’s machine. It was adult, and not the nice kind of adult either.

Because this violated council policy in oh-so-many ways, we deleted it quietly.

Behold, a self own!

The employee in question complained, claiming we had removed “personal” files. (I never saw the videos, happily, but my understanding is that he wasn’t in them. They were stuff he had downloaded.)

We pointed at the policy.

He went to the CEO and complained.

The CEO came to us. My boss had figured this might happen (the employee in question was an… interesting… guy), and showed the CEO one of the videos. Which was on the backups, just in case we deleted something we shouldn’t and had to restore it. (We were good enough at our jobs that we never had to do that, but better safe than sorry.)

I wasn’t there when it happened, but by all accounts the CEO hauled the employee and the employee’s boss (boss of the SB) to an out-of-hearing location and ripped them a new one. The only reason the employee wasn’t fired was because he technically worked for the SB, and not the council.

It’s good for the OP to clarify the OP their position on this behaviour.

FYI, we would regularly block adult sites. But, being the early 2000’s, new ones popped up all the time. Unless an employee tried to access them, we probably didn’t know they existed.

It’s not that we were prudes, it’s just that most staff weren’t stupid enough to browse that stuff at work.

Let’s see what the commenters would have done.

It must be frustrating when the people at the top are the offending party.

Sounds like someone has a grudge against IT staff.

This person has a sneaky solution. I have a feeling he’s speaking from personal experience.

It really does feel like one of those cop shows. No awareness of irony!

Work computers are for work, people!