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Does Your Company Pay For Broadband?
masq57 writes "My fellow administrators and I used to have company provided ISDN lines in our homes so that we could respond quickly to issues after hours. That was changed in the last few years to letting us expense our broadband service. Now our new CIO has elected to stop that benefit using the argument that we should be dedicated staff who desire to be responsive and should do what it takes to make that happen. The rumor now is that we should also pay for blackberries, cell phones and pagers. What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?"
You DON'T want a pager anyway. In my experience, when they give you one, you are expected to respond if it beeps.
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
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Anything I pay for doesn't get used for business. Period.
Clothes?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Always respond to unexpected after-hours calls with, "I have been drinking, and I can't drive."
As a developer, the one time I got a support call I answered with "I drunk, but whadehell I'll try" then proceeded to screw up the system into "must recover from backup" state. They never called me after hours again, strange that...
-hadohk
>>Anything I pay for doesn't get used for business. Period.
>Clothes?
Something tells me that if the average slashdotter arrives at work unclothed, they will not only pay for him to get clothes, they'll pay him to do it immediately. Flip side, they may also bill him for therapy.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
A few years ago the company I worked for used to supply a few of us with ISDN lines (this was before cable/DSL was readily available) so we could work from home. They paid for the connection and footed the bill for rental and calls. At the time, though, ISDN was still metered by the minute in the UK and so you paid for the duration of your call - what's more, if you bonded the two channels into one 128Kb connection then you paid for each channel (ie. it was effectively two separate phone calls). Off peak this could be as much as 5p per minute per channel. In otherwords it wasn't cheap :)
Well, all was fine until the sorry day when I downloaded the Unreal Tournament demo to try out. Suddenly I found that being one of the l337 few with a 'low ping' connection I was really good and so I bought the full game when it was released. Next thing I knew I joined a clan and was playing all the time. Then - you guessed it - the bills started arriving....
You try explaining to your boss how you've managed to wrack up a bill for over 100 ($185) a month by 'working from home'. Not easy, especially when the server logs seem to indicate you'd never actually telneted to the server more than a couple of times to read your mail... Bah!
If my job had that as a fringe benefit, I'd be willing to pay for my own broadband, too.
~Idarubicin
Absolutely!
At the company I run, not only are my employees dedicated enough that they're willing to go the extra mile to ensure availability in the off hours, but they do the same during workdays as well. They work in a cubicle that they rent, with a desktop PC that they purchase from the company (at a more than reasonable rate, due to the volume discount that we get and generously pass on to them), use office supplies that they provide, and even pitch in for their share of the electric bill.
Some would call it "wage slavery". I call it "smart business".
Of course, this is only theoretical, since I haven't actually hired anyone yet. In fact, no one has even sent me a resume. I'm sure it's because everyone's such loyal and dedicated employees that they just don't want to leave the companies they're already working for.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
I had this happen at a previous company. But I was smart about it--I planned on writing off every dime I paid for work-related expenses. This turns out to be very difficult to do if you use your personal items part of the time for business and part of the time for personal use. So the only logical conclusion: get separate items you can use 100% for business, and that way you can write those off 100% without fear of getting audited by the IRS. When I explained this to my manager, she balked but I asked if they would allow me to expense professional tax services (around $400/year) and she said no. The upshot is, when they tell you to pay for these things out of your own pocket, you can choose to do it any way you want to...after all, it's your money, right? :)
I had good cell service and an awesome broadband connection already...so I couldn't justify spending a lot on a second cell and Internet connection, which was necessary for the aforementioned tax purposes. I found a cell provider that had a pay-as-you-go plan...use no minutes that month, and pay no money other than a $1.95 monthly service charge to keep the account open...and I got a free cell phone to boot for signing up (there was like a $50 activation fee, but I was allowed to expense this based on the argument that I already had a cell, I was only doing this for tax purposes and the good of the company, so I didn't want to pay a second activation fee). By deferring to choose a plan that included any minutes, I effectively had a zero minute plan that shuttled all callers directly to voicemail (I would explain that I couldn't afford a lot of minutes, and I couldn't afford a plan for the business phone that included a lot of minutes...and oh yea, I signed a three year contract so no changies! Unless the company wants to let me expense the $150 early termination fee). The good thing is my voicemail could be picked up on the web or forwarded to my email in the form of a wav file, so I didn't need to spend minutes checking it.
This didn't work out so well, so ultimately my manager agreed to deal with my situation as a special case and allow me to expense an inexpensive fixed minute plan. But wouldn't ya know it...just as soon as one thing is addressed, another takes its place! It turns out that the free cell phone I got with the plan had a set of expensive, proprietary batteries that easily set a memory. Little did I know! But within a few weeks of having the phone, the one set of batteries it came with would only go about 5 minutes on a full charge. I was allowed to expense another set for around $80, but those quickly set the same memory at around 5 minutes of talk time. I just couldn't remember to fully cycle those things before charging them for the life of me!
I found a 9600bps modem in my dad's basement and was able to find a service provider that offered very cheap 24kbps connections...the downside of course is that it would drop the connection every few minutes, but what do you expect for $3.95/month? Fortunately, the ISP also provided an email inbox/forwarding service so I could keep the separation between my personal and business life very clean and clear for the IRS. Unfortunately, that forwarding service never seemed to work! And that was unfortunate because that's where all those voicemails from my cell service were getting forwarded to. Oh well!
I felt that since the business cell and the dialup account were purely for business it was completely justified for me to make all research, purchase, setup, and customer support calls from the office during the normal workday. I quickly learned that even the simplest of issues can be quite time-consuming to deal with over the phone. If things got too busy at work, some showstopping problem on my cell plan or dial-up account might not get dealt with for weeks! Finally, I had to schedule several-hour long appointments with myself in Microsoft Outlook to make these support calls and get these problems sorted out. And I did generate a lot of suppo
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.