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Depending on your business and your employees? Equipment. I recently worked at a TV station and regularly asked my boss if I could do things like borrow a came
by jeffool 15y ago
Depending on your business and your employees? Equipment.
I recently worked at a TV station and regularly asked my boss if I could do things like borrow a camera on a weekend, or installed a single game for some of us to play after hours when no one was working.
The answer was always "no". That was unfortunate. The camera I kinda get; it could break. But using my computer at work, when no one else is? Seemed relatively harmless.
- elemeno 15y agoIt's less harmless than it than it looks. No is the only sensible answer to both of those questions, purely for liability reasons. If the camera gets damaged while you're out doing a personal project, is it still covered by the station's insurance? Quite possibly not if it's not being used for work purposes. If you download a game it turns out to have a virus in it, where does the liability for that fall? If he'd said no to things like "Would the company pay for a Wii for the team to use in it's off hours", or something like that and he said no, then it might seem more churlish - but your request just don't seem like ones he can easily say yes to to begin with.
- jeffool 15y agoI understood my employer's concerns. I hold no ill will for those answers. But I do think that, with the appropriate legwork, those suggestions can give rise to exactly what the OP is asking for. There's a good chance that the company has access to hardware/software of various types that his employees don't. And there's a chance his employees would like to use it. Would it be covered by insurance if something went wrong? Definitely something to check on. But that phone call is likely free for him, and a potential higher premium may not be too much higher. It's just an idea to consider. And things like hosting a PC game for people can be very safe. Certainly no less safe than installing a web browser on a PC. It just takes a little legwork to make sure it's trustworthy (like any software you install) and finding a game people like. I suggest it because I find it analogous to going to the driving range. "It's Friday afternoon and there aren't any vital issues. Let's get in a couple of rounds of XYZ and head out."
- m0nastic 15y agoOne of the most awful forensic engagements (that didn't involve the threat of bodily harm) I ever worked was for a company who called me in to image the drives for an entire video production department. Apparently, they discovered that one of their employees, in his spare time, had used one of the editing stations to edit video for his church. When they disciplined him about it, he stated that "everyone else was doing the same thing", which made them panic and decide to treat the whole department as a forensic incident. I can't think of a more innocuous use of resources than "editing church video in my spare time", but they were all freaked out about it. You'd be surprised what companies worry about. I had the envious task of imaging ~ 35 workstations (and 2 big-ass RAID arrays) in the middle of the night before employees were supposed to be back in the office the next morning.
- rmc 15y agoThey were probably worried that some other employee was making sexually explicit videos, or even worse, videos of child sexual abuse. If that was happening, it might come out eventually. If it came out that the company was also aware that employees were making personal videos, then that's potentially bad PR for them.
- m0nastic 15y agoCorrect, they were specifically worried about the appearance of them condoning whatever content was produced if it was publicly known. The result from this was for them to just dissolve that entire department, and then outsource any future video production that they might need.