Forced Work Slowdown


I realize in today's world that there is a need for a company to protect itself from technological attacks. Whether it be intellectual property theft or malware. It's one of those ugly facts of life we have to accept. What I'm ticked about today is one of the repercussions of such 'protection'.

For the past nine years I have used the Internet at work to search for articles, books, research, thesis papers, etc. to support the ingredients used in our products. By being able to use Scholar.Google, I've been able to save a ton of time (roughly doubling the work I can get done in an hour) importing articles directly into EndNote.

In fact, there are times when all I can find is a citation and by importing it into EndNote I have been able to find out more details than what is readily available. Which in turn has made it so I can then use inter-library loan and find a copy of the original article to add to our database.

Recently I have been finding a new twist to my searches.


Yes, I do work fast and yes sometimes it feels like I'm a robot, going from one article to another. However, to me this "I'm not a robot" interruption is a time waster.

To make things even more interesting, and more time wasting, I'm forced to play a game!!!! It's called click on the pictures that have a traffic light, or a bike, or a crosswalk, or a fire hydrant, or a chimney.

 
To make matters worse, the images are small, grainy and not easy to determine if I've found all the 'Hidden Picture' objects demanded by this game! Cataracts don't make it easier!

And as if that weren't enough, sometimes the game errors out!


Yeah, I'm not happy about this.

I'm seeing more and more businesses getting away from unions as more and more business owners are offering more and better employee incentives and as the Federal and State governments are mandating more benefits offered to the employees.

That's all well and good. However, it sure does feel like there's a Union work slow-down in progress.

  • A slowdown (UK: go-slow[1]) is an industrial action in which employees perform their duties but seek to reduce productivity or efficiency in their performance of these duties. A slowdown may be used as either a prelude or an alternative to a strike, as it is seen as less disruptive as well as less risky and costly for workers and their union. Striking workers usually go unpaid and risk being replaced, so a slowdown is seen as a way to put pressure on management while avoiding these outcomes. Other times slowdowns are accompanied by intentional sabotage on the part of workers to provide further disruption.
  • Nonetheless, workers participating in a slowdown are often punished, sometimes by firing and other times by law. (Wikipedia)

 Yeah, I'm getting punished all right. I just have to keep chanting my mantra. '51 weeks, 51 weeks, 51 weeks.'

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