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Should You Get Paid While Your Computer Boots?
An anonymous reader notes a posting up at a law blog with the provocative title Does Your Boss Have to Pay You While You Wait for Vista to Boot Up?. (Provocative because Vista doesn't boot more slowly than anything else, necessarily, as one commenter points out.) The National Law Journal article behind the post requires subscription. Quoting: "Lawyers are noting a new type of lawsuit, in which employees are suing over time spent booting [up] their computers. ... During the past year, several companies, including AT&T Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp., have been hit with lawsuits in which employees claimed that they were not paid for the 15- to 30-minute task of booting their computers at the start of each day and logging out at the end. Add those minutes up over a week, and hourly employees are losing some serious pay, argues plaintiffs' lawyer Mark Thierman, a Las Vegas solo practitioner who has filed a handful of computer-booting lawsuits in recent years. ... [A] management-side attorney... who is defending a half-dozen employers in computer-booting lawsuits... believes that, in most cases, computer booting does not warrant being called work."
Get a Mac, set Energy Saver to boot and shutdown the computer at pre-arranged times. Right-click on Dock and set email, web browser and word processor to start on logon. If you work in a relaxed organization that doesn't require secure logins, you are ready to work when you walk in the office. With a logon to slow you down, you are still under 3 minutes to reading that annoying memo about the next round of layoffs.
Since you are being laid off anyway, try to get a job with a company that doesn't treat its employees like draft animals.
In 99% of the cases, the worker did not choose to use Windows. This was a decision made by management. So when it takes a million years to boot the blasted thing, its only fair that management pays for the time it takes, as they were the ones to push for it. Decisions have consequences, deal with it.
I get paid from the moment I walk into the office, until the moment I walk out.
If my employer doesn't like that, he can sack me.
My life is too short to take any shit from a bean counter.