Ken Chu said "In my office at work I sometimes sneakily read my private e-mails (sometimes I breath too but not as often as I do e-mailing), and because hotmail in its blue swish looking glory looks nothing like work, I have to hide the window underneath some spreadsheets I'm working on, so for most of the time I'd be be reading the top half of the subject lines of sinister e-mails.. " I know how Ken feels. I suppose I am lucky, cos I have a yahoo account, but unlucky cos I've changed it to pink. And I don't have any spreadsheets in pink. I also have to sneak attack my inbox, and can advise Ken, from my sneaking, how to do this realitively effectively. 1. Wait until everyone disappears to meetings, and then go wild on the web. 2. reduce the size of your internet window, and drag it down to the bottom of the screen so it looks like part of the work you are working on. 3. Make everything on your pootah hotmail-blue (perhaps not the official painters colour name for it)- your screensaver, your company email letter head, your wallpaper,your socks, your spreadsheets.. the lot. This way, nobody will guess cos it will all just merge in nicely. 4. When you are online, quickly copy and paste entire e mails into a MS word page, close down/minimise your e mail window, and then you can sit and read it at your leisure and nobody will be any the wiser. 5. When composing e mails, compose them in MS Word first of all, then when you do a sneaky hotmail open thing, you can just do the whole cut'n'paste action (and heres a challenge, Ken- how about changing the words of "Shake'n'Vac" to "Cut'n'Paste"? You do the cut'n'paste and make time waste, do the cut'n'paste and make time waste... or something.. try singing that next time your in the loo! ;-) ) 6. If like me, you're on flexitime (Time is not really flexible though, is it? I mean, can you physically bend a minute??) then simply come in earlier to work, before the people sitting near you, and sit surfing the net; or leave later in the evening and sit surfing the net; or change your lunch hours and sit surfing the net. This has the added bonus if you're paid by the hour, cos you can pretend you're being very good and sitting working really really hard. And get paid for it. Personally, I'd rather be in bed than come into work early, but you know, sometimes I am fifteen minutes earlier than my work collegues/ millions of bosses, and sit tap-tap-tapping away in personal e mails. Ken, m'dear, I hope this helps. And I hope it helps everyone else here too who is at work and with all this open-plan desk arrangement nonsense, feeling a little worried about getting caught. Can I also say, if you do get caught, in your defence, heres the explanation: People can only really take in information for fifteen minutes at a time*. Therefore, you need a few seconds to let your brain digest the information you have. And therefore you have opted to look at something else. This makes you work more effectively. Alternatively: emails make you happy. Happy people work better. If you feel more relaxed then you can work more effectively, therefore increasing your productivity. (tell them its been proven by some university or other.) Or: This job sucks. I'd rather read my e mails. Go away. or how about: I am conducting a survey for (give reason relating to work issue) as requested by (name some top head honcho dude here) and this is a confidential research thing that I'm doing under cover so not as to draw attention to the company and stuff, and I'm afraid I can't tell you anymore and if I did then I'd have to kill you (end with menacing laugh- Evil Dr Chu style) Thankyou. Hope that helps. Love, popidles kiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskiskis ps. * fiftteen minutes... um.. I might have got that wrong. That might be how much fame you're entitled to, or the attention span of agoldfish. I get confused. ===== http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/corduroysmoke and the world did get covered in a thick haze of corduroy smoke. And it felt good. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find the one for you at Yahoo! Personals http://personals.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+