On social media, celebrity disappearances and the arrival of winter!

The European Court of Human Rights upheld the decision of a Rumanian court that a company was within its rights to monitor the private correspondence of one its employees. Ouch! Granted he was using the work computer to email his fiancée and his brother but even so, it's a very grey area. The fact that you have a WORK computer and sometimes a WORK phone does suggest that those things should be used for WORK. The clue is in the name. But sometimes the edges blur. 

I was always careful to use my own computer and my personal email account to contact friends and family. However, there were people I knew through work who only had my work email. And occasionally they wanted to contact me for social reasons. What do you do then? Or sometimes, colleagues wanted to organise something like, a drink after work. The fastest way to contact everyone was via the work email. Should they lose their job for that?

The whole monitoring thing is very tricky. If your boss trusts you to do your job efficiently and well, should he really need to check your work email? Do you work as well as you could if you feel the steely eye of the boss on you at all times. Once again, ouch! 

And then there is the question of the wider social media. Should your employer have the right to pry into your Facebook or Twitter account. My gut reaction is, certainly not! After all, they would not expect to have access to snail mail arriving through your home letterbox. Most of us denied our parents the right to read our letters from quite an early age. 

And yet, I find myself wanting to tell friends to be a little more circumspect in what they put out there on Facebook and the like. Whether you like it or not, people who are not your "friends" still manage to see your posts on occasion, no matter what privacy settings you put up. 

Stefan Stern, writing in the Guardian pointed out that there might be a plus side to the accessibility of your social media stuff. "For example, your social media presence may not only amuse and impress your friends, but could remind a potential employer that you are available. If we are heading for a “gig” economy, we will need to publicise our services even when we are nominally off duty. How many of your Facebook friends are really friends, for that matter? Are they in fact contacts? Or both? There may be no simple answers to these questions in 2016." It's an opinion, I suppose. 

As for sending the odd private social message on your work computer or checking your Facebook on work's time, is it really so very different from having a private chat with a work colleague at the next desk, also on work's time? 

Fortunately, I no longer have to worry about such things and can be amused by what younger "friends" or friends post. Two such had an exchange this morning where one was bemoaning the fact that so many people just use Facebook to recycle the news, especially when it is about the death of 69 year old celebrities, of which there have been rather too many lately. As one of them said, it's not really just about expressing how upset you are that yet another of your idols has popped his clogs; what it's really about is trying to be the FIRST to do so! 

One of the things that amused me was an item from Newsthump, which can be relied on to take a sideways look at anything and everything:

"Game of Thrones author George RR Martin is responsible for ‘New Year 2016’ in which he kills off all your favourite characters, he has acknowledged. He began writing the work late last year when he bumped off Lemmy in the prologue, before moving on to chapters one and two where David Bowie and Alan Rickman met sudden and ill-deserved ends, leading to an outcry from fans." 

(So that is why George RR Martin has not been meeting his deadlines for writing the next book in the series. nothing at all to do with being busy writing screenplays for the TV series!) 

Meanwhile, serious news items are warning the over 69s, or even possibly the over 60s to keep warm over the next week, when temperatures are expected to plummet to as low as -15!!!! Well, there was already ice on the puddles this morning, frost on the rooftops and a distinct chill in the air. 

But the sky was blue instead of grey which was a good start. It waited until mid afternoon to return to grey and gloomy. Let's see what tomorrow brings.