How much time do workers spend on the Web?

...eBay is the most popular destination for UK office workers on the skive. Four in ten admit that trawling through eBay is the most popular site of all for a bit of time-killing while at work, followed by those visiting sites dabbling in sports, holidays and property.

The survey of more than 600 employers and employees by recruitment outfit Portfolio Payroll and employment law firm Peninsula found that workers are using the internet for personal use more than ever before. Peninsula has a bit of a thing about the net and shirking workers. In July, it published research (see 'Frivolous' workers fritter away time online) which found that British office workers are spending almost half their day surfing the net and sending emails. And the problem is getting worse, with workers spending, on average, three hours a day online, compared to two hours in 2003.

That's from Michael Stastny, who writes for the fascinating Mahalanobis blog.

I cannot vouch personally for UK working conditions, so in a pinch why not cite some outright fiction? I have recently become a big fan of the BBC TV show The Office, now available on DVD. This hilarious show, about the foibles of the British workplace, is an object lesson in industrial organization, the difficulty of pinning down the right incentives, and how corporate management sometimes resembles central planning?

Here is one insightful Amazon review...

"It feels both inaccurate and inadequate to describe The Office as a comedy. On a superficial level, it disdains all the conventions of television sitcoms: there are no punch lines, no jokes, no laugh tracks, and no cute happy endings. More profoundly, it's not what we're used to thinking of as funny. Most of the fervently devoted fan base watched with a discomfortingly thrilling combination of identification and mortification. The paradox is that its best moments are almost physically unwatchable. Set in the offices of a fictional British paper merchant, The Office is filmed in the style of a reality television show. The writing is subtle and deft, the acting wonderful, and the characters beautifully drawn: the cadaverous team leader Gareth (Mackenzie Crook); the monstrous sales rep, Chris Finch (Ralph Ineson); and the decent but long-suffering everyman Tim (Martin Freeman), whose ambition and imagination have been crushed out of him by the banality of the life he dreams uselessly of escaping. The show is stolen, as it was intended to be, by insufferable office manager David Brent, played by codirector-cowriter Ricky Gervais. Brent will become a name as emblematic for a particular kind of British grotesque as Basil Fawlty, but he is a deeper character. Fawlty is an exaggeration of reality, and therefore a safely comic figure. Brent is as appalling as only reality can be. --Andrew Mueller"

Yes you will find the anti-capitalist mentality in this show, but I doubt if few will walk away with a fervent belief in government planning as the proper response.