Uh oh! Busted! Switch on your screensaver, here comes the boss...

Blogging (and surfing the web in general) are becoming so much a part of office life I think it's only a matter of time before access will become enshrined as a basic human right!

Get it into the re-negotiated Agreement now!

It used to be said that the working class were only one square meal away from revolution. It'll soon be the case that the middle class will only be one full day's broadband accesss from revolt (or at least a series of increasingly exasperated phone calls to ntl)

Kvetch . . . ?!? . . . On second thoughts, I don't want to know.

Hugo Chavez feared there would be revolution if Venezuela ran out of beer

Kvetch is yiddish for commiserate

With long hours and only 2 weeks holiday in the year they have to let off steam somehow.

I am a bottom-of-the-rung civil servant, and a new graduate to boot, and I don’t know what I’d do with my time at work if the Internet was not available to me. My job entails photocopying, filing, circulating memos on toilet breaks (that usually have been re-worded by 5 different line managers before it reaches its final draft) and not much else. My tasks for the entire week are completed by 11am on a Monday, so I spend the rest of my time writing Blogs and surfing the Internet.

It’s only a matter of time until I’m disciplined over my Internet usage – but what else am I to do? There is no work to be done and I can’t read a book as that would make it too obvious that there is no work to be done. How people can work their entire lives in the Civil Service is a mystery

Pepper-Ann

I work in the civil service as well and it's amazing, I could have written your post as well, word for word.

The upside is: Some of the world's greatest geniuses spent time in the civil service (James Joyce, Albert Einstein to name but two) presumably because it's quite a good place to while away the hours while you contemplate how you're going to make your mark on the world before they stick you into a wooden box and lower you into the ground forever. So get busy writing that novel/screenplay/memoir. And even if you don't, what's wrong with getting paid a weekly wage for sitting in an internet café for 5 days a week, surfing and blogging? people who contend that there's some kind of extra 'reward' for doing 'hard' work in a 'challenging environment' as the ads in the appointments pages put it, are deluding themselves.

90% of the workforce at this stage do the exact same thing, all day, every day; they sit at a desk, tapping away at a keyboard, and push the paper piles from one side of their desks to the other. It doesn't matter whether you are in the public or private sector, I know plenty of people who are in the private sector who are more bored than I am and with goood reason.

At least with internet access I have free reign to go and search for topics that interest me and try to learn more about them. On the other hand, I coul spend all day surfing porn if I wanted, although most IT administrators have 'webmarshalls' now that prevent people from doing that.

i'll think you find that the NICS internet use policy will actively prevent you from opening webpages that fall under certain categories, including porn, guns, hatred etc.

Someone has to check through such sites to confirm their content though. Nice job! ;)