There are stories that defy logic, and then there's this one:
An administrative judge has denied unemployment benefits to a woman who was fired from her job for keeping a journal detailing her efforts to avoid work.
Emmalee Bauer, 25, of Elkhart, was employed by the Sheraton hotel company as a sales coordinator in Des Moines. While on the job, she kept a handwritten journal. A supervisor told her to stop writing on company time, but instead, Bauer wrote her journal, all 300 single-spaced pages, on her work computer.
In the journal, portions of which were introduced during a recent hearing regarding Bauer's request for unemployment, Bauer describes her efforts to avoid work.
"This typing thing seems to be doing the trick," she wrote. "It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important."
Bauer also wrote: "I am only here for the money and, lately, for the printer access. I haven't really accomplished anything in a long while ... and I am still getting paid more than I ever have at a job before, with less to do than I have ever had before. It's actually quite nice when I think of it that way. I can shop online, play games and read message boards and still get paid for it."
Companies are starting to block employee access to certain sites because of this sort of behavior. I knew a guy who blogged at work and wondered why the company didn't block access to MySpace and such. It seems like it might have increased productivity. But maybe the bigwigs were on MySpace, too.
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