Privacy

I have always been a bit of a recluse. In high school and college I was always jovial during the day but hesitated to any invitation to go out and get to know people better. I'm slightly suspicious by nature and to reveal too much to people only means that eventually they will be able to use it against you. For this reason I never had a room mate nor was I able to share a bedroom with my sister without several altercations a week but I digress. Since I've started my job I have taken great pains to avoid anonymity both with this blog and at work. People don't know very much about me and what I do for fun, or what I do outside of the office. I'm not anti-social mind you, if you followed me on a normal day you would catch me bullshitting with co-workers, chatting on the company IM service and talking on the phone to people in the New York offices, who I don't see too often anymore. There are a few things that I will never get used to.

1) Cubicles; We've all seen Office Space and marveled at how sad the cubicle existence truly is. If you've never worked in a cubicle allow me to let you know that that movie was spot on. If I want to be left alone to work there is nothing stopping me co-workers (some with boundary issues) from leaning over me to ask obnoxious questions and favors. I yearn for a door every day of my working life. (To update those lucky enough to have never encountered such monstrosities, they have started to referring to cubicles as "workstations" but if I call a pile of dug shit a rose it's not going to fool anyone.)

2) Monitored Emails; It's inevitable, you give one friend your work email, or they get it off a business card and suddenly '20 great reasons why women are better then beer' start popping up in your in-box. We can not check internet mail from work so I'm stuck on the company account, which is OWNED by the company which means they can check all your emails as they please. Not that I enjoy forwarded messages about starving cancer kids who will get a free trip to Disney world if this email gets forwarded to 200 people which will subsequently make Bill Gates give everyone 1000.00 dollars and Applebees (never eaten there don't want to) will comp me a dinner, but at work its just not what I need. And god forbid any email should contain the words; fuck, shit, cunt, pussy, ass, bitch, nigga (or its evil cousin), Jew (yes Jew the proper term for someone of the jewish faith is banned), or any additional ethnic slur or curse, and compliance will reign town a terror on my ass.

3) Monitored Phone calls; All phone calls are monitored in two ways. First every number I make or receive a call from is recorded and sent to my boss (who never ever looks at those things.) This is a bit disturbing because it had recently come to light that several cleaning staff were using employee phones to call home after hours. How am I going to explain the phone calls to Guayagil, when I didn't even know there was a place of that name? The second way calls are monitored is by recording conversations. So should I tell someone in jest that I can't stand bank regulations on harassment, I find myself in an HR office explaining that no I don't have issues and that was a joke and I didn't mean it and I'm sorry and it will never happen again.

4) Personal space; Forget it it doesn't exist.

5) Internet Spys; I have checked this website 3 times from the office making sure to always use a different computer and log in name. I still fear retribution.

To some it all up check it out