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Should Employees Be Paid While Slow Computers Boot?

Should Employees Be Paid while Computers Boot?
If you spend your day sitting at a desk at a computer, when do you boot up your machine? If you do it when you get in, do you count that time spent booting toward your overall workday? Or, do you come in ahead of time to let it boot up? We're guessing there aren't many people getting out of bed 15 minutes earlier just to make sure their computers are logged in and warmed up precisely at 9:00 am (or whenever their workday starts), and whether or not they should is a subject currently being debated in a legal battle between employees and companies like AT&T, United Health Group, and Cigna, a case many will be watching.

The employees contend that installation of Windows Vista on aging hardware, plus the enforcement of some rather draconian security policies, result in machines that take somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes to complete. That's upwards of an hour lost per day, during which time the employees can't really do anything about it.

The companies contend, however, that those employees go take smoke breaks or head to the water cooler while their machines boot, meaning they're not getting any work done, anyway. Who is to blame? That is something the courts will decide, but it seems a wee bit crazy to give your employees slow hardware and then punish them for it! What do you think? [From: Electronista]

Tags: bootup, lawsuit, shutdown, windows, windows vista, WindowsVista, workplace

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