Write and Get Paid Use our content
  • Sign up
  • ‎What is Shvoong?‎
  • Sign In
    Sign In
    Remember my username Forgot your password?

Summaries and Short Reviews

.

Languages
Shvoong Home>Social Sciences>Office and employees and bosses Summary

.

Office and employees and bosses

Book Summary by: SusheelSukhraj     

Original Author: Susheel
  • Summary rating: 5 stars (2 Ratings)
  • Visits : 84
  • words:900 
  • Comments : 0

Revenge of the employee
From guards to vice presidents, almost everybody these days is
misusing the office in creative ways.
   Shah is a security guard in a software services firm who has begun to relish part of his 12-hour gruelling schedule. He bathes in the luxurious executive washroom and even dries his clothes before the white collars begin to arrive. The guards’ toilet, he says, stinks. He is confident that nobody can catch him because, “The office works for only eight hours and the extra fours hours can be used as I like.” His friend Jamil who works in a posh bank office in the Bandra-Kurla Complex, has an arrangement with fellow guards. During Diwali, when his bosses usually take long leaves, he does not go to work. Instead, he sends his brother in his uniform. 
   A man who works as a cleaner in a media house in Kamala Mills regularly goes to the office gym, sometimes even during office hours. He was warned by the services contractor some months ago but he remains unperturbed. “No one from the office uses it anyway,” he says. 
   These are among the common cases of abuse that every office today faces. But the adventures at the bottom of the pyramid are nothing compared to the extent to which the upper echelons misuse the office. Lonely bachelors come in on Sundays to surf for porn or make long distance calls. Some come in on holidays to send resumes to prospective employers. Others come with their lovers to make good use of empty air-conditioned cabins. It is not unusual for cleaners in some offices to discover condoms. The office today has evolved into something more than just a workplace. For many, it has become something that is hard to name. It is not exactly an extension of home because a home is not so abused. It is not a resort either because there you eventually pay the bill. The office is probably more like a house one has broken into. 
   Saumil Patel, founder of Inega Model Management, remembers trying to reach his secretary’s extension. When she was not responding, he went to her cabin and discovered her boyfriend using her computer. He was, in fact, downloading profiles of all the models listed with the agency. Employees also routinely pilfer office stationery. In most IT companies, employees print out complete e-books of software such as Java or ASP when a tiny update is released. They also, under the pretext of printing these same updates also take voluminous printouts of literary works and popular fiction that would have otherwise cost them hundreds of rupees. The printer, in fact, is the single most abused thing in an office. Probably, that’s the reason it dies so often and as a result is widely regarded as the most annoying thing in an office (among the inanimate). 
   Even senior managers are not above board. In fact, when they abuse the office, they abuse it in a big way. On foreign jaunts, executives are known to avail of the services of call girls. The expenditure is billed to the company under more respectable headings. An HR executive says last year, her finance vice president was criminally charged after an amusing discovery was made regarding the company flat he was entitled to. The flat he had leased belonged to his wife. So the rent that the company was paying to the “landlord” was actually going directly into his wife’s account. 
   However, it is not the exceptional cases of misuse that really drain an office, but the many simple abuses that almost every worker indulges in, like the use of the phone and internet bandwidth for personal use. The vast amounts of coffee and chatting are other examples. Companies are aware that offices and resources are being seriously misused, but the general opinion of HR personnel is that a solution is hard to find. For the moment, everyone is pretending that what happens between two swipes of a plastic card is essentially “work”.
Published: July 18, 2007
Please Rate this Review : 1 2 3 4 5
Add your comment Translate Send Link Print
Next Summary

Bookmark & share this post

.