Do you get paid while your PC boots up? I hope for your sake that you’ve never even had to think about it; an office where that’s an issue sounds like an awful place to work.

Unfortunately, these offices do seem to exist, though. In fact, several companies in the US have been sued by employees in the last year over claims that they lose hours a week to startup and shutdowns, for which they aren’t paid a penny.

It would be easy for me to criticise here the US’s litigious culture, the stinginess of companies that don’t pay people to prepare the tools of their trade, the sluggishness of Windows or employees who can’t think of anything better to do while they wait for their PC to boot. Buy a newspaper, make a coffee, read a book – hell, write a book, but don’t sit there plotting a lawsuit against your employer.

The problem is that I can’t tell who is more deserving of a good mocking; the whole situation is patently ridiculous.

I will suggest, though, that if you happen to be a manager who makes employees come in to work early, unpaid, and boot their machine, that you stop it. Stop it now. It’s very tight, and it’s counter-productive.

Casting my mind back to my university days, I had several friends who worked in the same bar. I can remember that at the end of the night they stopped getting paid when the last customer was served – then had to clean the whole bar from top to bottom. I remember being told that the staff took, shall we say, a somewhat less than thorough approach to this task. It’s the same thing.

Computers are a ubiquitous tool, and there’s virtually no trade that can escape having to use them. They are a tool, though, and preparing them for work is part of work, it’s as simple as that.

As a side note, the article suggested that it takes between 15 and 30 minutes to boot a computer. A quick test here (booting a machine and loading Word, Outlook and a browser window of choice) showed that this is complete nonsense;

< 1:00 – David Fearon’s Windows 7 installation
2:30 – My trusty Shuttle desktop
6:45 – Bayon’s laptop
7:30 – David Fearon’s XP installation