Community ClicksMistaken identity
For 10 years we’ve lived in a house that shares an address with another house nearby, except they’re a “Court” and we’re a “Road.”
Consequently, we get misdirected goods and services (always c.o.d.) like liquor, pizza and gutter cleaning.
Recently while we were away, we received 100 gallons of unordered heating oil along with a bill.
I phoned the erring oil company, and the service manager said they would come siphon it out.
They never came, and we never paid their bill, but we did use the oil.
OK?
— Robert Cappio, Armonk, N.Y.
Semi-OK.
You’re free to use — and pay for — this oil, but not required to.
Perhaps you prefer the oil your usual supplier provides; maybe it has the hearty aroma of real beef gravy.
Or you might feel loyal to that supplier.
It would then fall to the erring company to correct its mistake, as it agreed to.
You should give them that chance.
But you needn’t wait forever for them to do so.
You might want to take a hot bath right now or heat your home before the next frost.
And so you should give the errant company one more call and tell it that if it doesn’t promptly keep its vow to remove its oil, you intend to use but not pay for that which you did not order, just as you would with a misdelivered pizza.
This assumes that you use oil heat and that the misdelivered fuel was pumped into your tank and not your backyard pool or giant birdbath or enormous cat. (Insert BP joke here.)
Porn in the office
Arriving at work, I often find that my boss, who owns the business, had been looking at pornography after-hours on the computer we sometimes share.
He has no private office, and this computer is the most isolated.
Sometimes he leaves those pages open, so I can’t help seeing them.
I don’t care what he does so long as it’s not in my work space.
Asking him to stop might
endanger my job.
May I turn on the parental controls and set a password?
— M.B., Philadelphia
If your boss is not downloading illegal material and there’s nobody else around to be discomfited and he tidies up the computer when he’s done, then I see no harm in his after-hours revelry.
The problem is: He doesn’t tidy up, and the next morning you are confronted with the afterimages of his carousing.
There are scenes none of us want seared onto our retinas.
Your next step is to tactfully ask the boss to close all Web pages when he’s finished with them.
It makes no difference what he views as long as you’re not forced to also.
If that fails, then turn on those parental controls, a tactic that is a bit childish in its obliqueness but not unethical.
As long as you do not impair anyone’s ability to get work done, place your employer in legal peril or thwart legitimate efforts at computer security, you should have broad latitude as to how you use your workplace computer and how you — inadvertently — do not.
But be prepared to respond when your boss figures out what you’ve done.
You are entitled to work in an environment that is not “hostile,” something generally understood to mean porn-free.
To learn what legal rights and recourse you have here, you would do well to contact a specialist in employment law.
Were these images imposed on you during work hours, then ethics would align with law and banish such material.
This is not to argue for or against the joy or squalor (or both) of porn, but to assert that it has no place on the job, where it can make employees uneasy.
