Porn: The Ultimate Stress Reliever, At Least If You Work At The SEC

Jobs can be stressful.  Balancing your work life with family, friends, hobbies, and other pursuits can be even more stressful.  Although lawyers are constantly rated as having one of the most stressful jobs, they are not the only ones.  Take government workers for example: working for the Securities Exchange Commission (especially in the wake of the tremendous publicity the organization has received post-Maddoff) can cause its employees to search for stress-relief outlets while on the clock.

I for one, find a lunchtime run a great way to relieve stress and a chance to get out of the office setting. One employee at the SEC found his relief right at the very computer he does his work on.  Perusing porn sites such, the civil servant was able to get through the work week by doing more internet browsing that he does billable hours.  He must have had a lot of stress because his supervisor later found that he had roughly 1,800 log-in attempts during his work hours.  His “tension relief” took up so much memory on his work computer that he eventually began saving the images (and storing them at his office desk, obviously) on CD’s and DVD’S.

The SEC employee (who is actually an attorney) is not alone.  In a recent internal investigation into the use of work time and equipment to download explicit images, dozens of employees were found to be accessing the sites.  The investigation also noted that many of the incidents occurred after the global financial meltdown and several of the employees held senior positions, earning between $99,300 and $222,418 per year.  I am going to go ahead and say that the SEC is having a bad year.

I, for one, think that stress relief must come in the form of something different.  If you work on a computer, then your stress relief should not have anything to do with the computer!  Although I am not going to go so far as to say that such an approach would have solved the little porn problem the SEC has on its hand, it is a start.  It is unfair to shift the blame off of the employees because the bottom line is that they should not be wasting their employer’s time and money looking at inappropriate websites.  At the same time, employers need to be aware of the conditions that they are creating, whether internally or externally for their employees to deal with.  It is no surprise that many of the incidents occurred during a very stressful financial time. What is surprising to me is the high volume of workplace porn in general.  Companies frequently monitor emails and block websites so it seems like people would have a little more concern at the prospect of being caught!