Rob Styles wrote:
|2. subsidising your workplace
|When Alex was told that he would have to do work in his spare time in
|order to show people the benefit he was being asked to subsidise his
|employer. However nicely put the underlying message is that he is not
|trusted enough to warrant even the smallest investment of time.
|
|It is perfectly reasonable, of course, not to invest in every idea -
|there is never enough time or money to do everything and priorities
|must be called. That's not what Alex was told, though. He was told
|that to pursue his idea he should subsidise the library by working on
|his own time. This strikes me as very, very wrong.
I don't know if Alex's employers actually told him what you've said they
told him, so I'm not going to address that.
However, I think there's at least one other interpretation of doing
something on your own time: working outside the box. If you can't
accomplish what you'd like *on* the job, then (if you're passionate
enough) you need to do it *off* the job. (Of course, if you're
passionate enough about wanting to do it on the job, then you'd need to
find a new job where such is possible.) It's also the kind of thing
that you might need to do off the job so that you can bring it to a new
employer. I don't think this is "very, very wrong", nor do I think
distrust is the only explanation for doing stuff outside of work time.
Harvey
--
===========================================
Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
847/506-2644 - FX: 847/506-2650 - Email: hhahn(at)ahml(dot)info
OML & Scripts web pages: http://www.ahml.info/oml/
Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
Received on Wed Sep 05 2007 - 10:22:25 EDT