The phrase ‘work appropriate’ can be used in many different scenarios.  You can be asked to wear work appropriate clothes, or behave professionally, and appropriate, while you are in the workspace (the video you watched on sexual harassment).  But the one that we all love is the reason that your monitor is turned away from the door, I’m talking about work appropriate websites.

What is a work appropriate website?  Generally I’ll open up anything that doesn’t lead me to believe I’m going to be seeing a lot of nudity.  Partial nudity I might let slip by, but only because I can blame it on a spam pop up when I was searching for something on the web.  And you should have your excuses ready because you know the I.T. guy is just waiting to tell your boss that you were surfing porn at work.

A little while back I was sitting in my cube trying to do some work - I know that is hard to believe.  The guy sitting in the cube directly in front of me got a phone call to his desk.  At first I overheard the usual conversation and I wished that he would stop talking so loudly, but then I noticed that his voice did get a little quieter. In fact, he was whispering.  Since I figured whatever he was talking about must be a secret, I decided to listen a little more intently.  The next thing I hear are the moans of a woman, this guy is watching some sort of porn video.  At first I laughed because I have friends that would send me a porn video at work and call it ‘Great Basketball Move.avi’.  However, it became increasingly worrisome when whatever he was watching went on for a good fifteen minutes.  Rule #1: If you’re going to watch porn at work, turn your volume down or at least put on headphones.  Rule #2: Don’t watch porn at work – you’ve been in the cube too long.

Aside from the occasional adult site that floats over to you in the office.  I think the next biggest culprit of non-work appropriate websites is probably game sites.  These sites are usually small, flash animated, games where you have to try to beat someone’s best time.  I can not resist the sexy lure of these games.  I will spend as much of my day as I can working on my best time.  The best idea is to attach a screenshot of your time when you send the link out to everyone.  This will entice them to beat your time, and will most likely have your entire office playing the game in no time.  The last two games to take a few hours off of my work day:

1. http://www.107.peugeot.co.uk/peugeot.swf
2. The goal is to park the car in as little time as possible.  Once you get to the second level, keep in mind that the best I've seen at the office is 4.0 second.  If you beat that, you have officially procrastinated your day away.
3. http://www.ebaumsworld.com/penguinswing.html
4. Always a classic this game will never grow old with me.  A penguin drops from above - and you, the abominable snowman, it it with a bat to see how far you can get him to fly.

I think everyone can agree that everyday we end up at non-work appropriate websites.  So what sites do you go to?  Let everyone else know so we can try to beat your scores.