Goldbrickin'

There was a little piece on Boston.com yesterday about some night shift mechanics at the commuter rail maintenance facility in Somerville, just outside of Boston, who've been taking longer breaks than allowed.  When their new manager went looking for them the other evening, he couldn't find his errant guys, but he did snap the padlock on an electrical cabinet and found:

...three televisions, two DVD players, one VHS player, surround-sound speakers, a video game system, and DVDs, some of them pornographic.

Not clear whether there's a man cave hidden in the facility somewhere - maybe with a dorm fridge and a couple of LaZ Boy rockers - but I'm guessing that, if there is one, the same little bird that lead the new manager to the work entertainment center will be twittering in his ear about it. Maybe the break-men hooked up the videos in one of the passenger cars. (As someone who frequents our local commuter rail service, I really don't want to think about these guys watching porn on those blue and maroon leatherette seats. Bad enough they were watching Rambo, one of the videos that was nabbed.)

No one has come forward to claim the equipment, but 6 workers have been suspended for break infractions - included one fellow who allegedly was spending his nice long breaks at a bar that he owns.

Ah, Happy Hour!

In addition to violating break-time rules, whoever brought all the gear in violated a prohibition on:

... bringing in equipment likely to distract them from their jobs.

Pornography is also verboten.

Needless to say, I'm not wild about the idea of folks taking porn breaks (especially if they took them in train cars that I ride in).  And I absolutely don't like the idea of these quasi-government workers - these guys don't work for the transit authority, but work under a government contract funded by tax money and train fares, both of which I pay - shaving an hour or so off of their time at work each day. 

But what's the big deal if they want to spend their allowed 45 minute break playing Super Mario Brothers or watching part of a Rambo movie?  As long as they can resist the temptation to watch the whole thing, who cares?

Thus, the real story should be the long breaks, not the cache of DVD's they had hidden, even though it makes the story far more titillating.

Not that there's no such thing as goldbricking in the private sector (even before the days of cyber-goldbricking). And not that I haven't occasionally indulged in a bit of it myself. But here's where wage vs. salary factors in.

If the Somerville Six had been able to extend their work hours to take into account their Rambo time, and as long as they were hitting their deadlines and not holding any one else's work up, who would care?

I can't possible recall the number of times I blew off the better portion of a Friday afternoon at work, shooting the shit with colleague, looking for a duvet cover on Bluefly, or staring off into space. My downtime would begin the second I realized that, no matter how close my nose was to the grindstone for the rest of the day, I was going to end up coming in on Saturday, anyway. 

This could be argued either way: I had to work on Saturday because I wasn't productive, or I wasn't productive because I was willing to work Saturdays. Extra hours didn't always equate to extra work getting done.

(In my experience, the most time-efficient people I ever worked with were mothers of small kids. There was absolutely no fat in their day, other than whatever fat was in the sandwich they ate while sitting at their desk working over lunch. When you have to pick the kids up at 5:30 on the dot, guess what? You get your work done so you can leave in time to get them.

A lot of time, when I was still working full time, I'd hear people complaining that a lot of extra work falls on the childless. There was some truth to this - especially in the pre-Internet/pre laptop days when you couldn't easily do work from home. It was often assumed that those who didn't have kids were able (and, therefore, willing) to stay late to finish up the whatever, and take the crappy, last minute trip to East Overshoe.

Without getting all shrinky here,  there was also some truth - at least in my case, and I suspect, the case of a few others - to the notion that those without kids may make more of an investment in their jobs precisely because they don't have kids.)

Over the course of my full-time career, I also took plenty of long lunches. Given how many non-lunches, and lunch-at-the-wheel breaks I took, it probably averaged out to 15 minutes per day. Still, there were some memorable ones.

My favorite long lunches were actually not lunches at all. They were long walks.

When I worked at Wang, a group of us took a walk at lunch most days, walking for half an hour or forty-five minutes. Anything to take a break from the oppressive atmosphere of the Wang Towers. (I'm still shuddering, and I worked there 20 years ago.)

But some days, when it was just my friend Cathy and me, we'd look at each other and ask, is this a one hour walk or a two hour walk? And plenty of days, it was a two hour walk.

Mostly, we'd talk shop. But sometimes we'd just talk.

One day, we got to talking, and - when we finally looked up - we realized that we had wandered off of our usual path (which mostly led to a discount Gap outlet in Chemlsford where you could get tee-shirts for $2), or - in really nice weather - to an ice cream stand. We had wandered away from urbia and suburbia, and were on some two-lane black top in the middle of the woods.

We forged on, hoping that, when we crested the next hill, we could at least catch sight of the Wang Towers. Or find a road sign. Or see a house. Nada.

After an hour or so, a cop car went by - the first car we'd seen since we'd realized we were lost - and we flagged it down.

As it turns out, we weren't all that far from civilization. We turned down the offer to pull up to the front entrance, siren wailing and flashers on.

Of course, by Wang standards, a three hour walk barely counted as goldbricking. There were a couple of guys in my group who would get to work, turn on their computers, hang their jackets on the back of their chairs, and take off. First stop, head down to the caf for a leisurely breakfast, while reading the newspapers.  After that, there was an hour or two of work, followed by a nice long workout. Then a late lunch. We were all product managers, and Wang had such an intricate bureaucracy and matrix structure - which product managers tapped into on just about ever node - that we could be anywhere other than in our cubes. Eventually, they got laid off, but, over time, that pretty much happened to everyone at Wang who didn't have the presence of mind to quit.

In any case, I wouldn't want to be in the work boots of any of the Somerville Six.

It's Christmas, a bad economy, and their jobs were probably decently paid and relatively secure. Maybe it'll all blow over; maybe they'll lose their jobs; maybe it'll be something in the middle.

But they're already out their equipment and DVD's. The gear has supposedly been donated to a worthy cause, and the porn done away with.