In mid-2004, when our plans to move to Oz were shaping up, I subscribed to a couple of online job portals. I was only vaguely hoping to land a job – it was more to get a feel for the job market. While they were by and large not very successful for me, it opened up a few avenues. It certainly allowed me to get acquainted with the mechanics of recruitment in Melbourne. The need to have a feel for the job market is less now but it is still a useful knowledge to have. I have therefore continued with the subscription and the portals continue to send me updates of positions which matched my selected profile. These updates are sent to my private email addresses and I can very safely say many employees do that – subscribe to these services and have responses sent to them at their private email addresses.

Recently, because of our house moving, I had my private emails forwarded to my office email address. With my ISP email, I simply added the account details to my Outlook. With my gmail account, I did both – added the account details on my Outlook AND altered the setting configuration on gmail so that all emails get forwarded to my office email. This was done about a month ago, soon after we signed the contract for the house.

I took last Friday off for the house moving. On Thursday night, I went to my Outlook account profiles and made it stop the downloads of my ISP and gmail accounts. I did this because I had seen the bosses’ wife go through a colleague’s emails before. This colleague is a litigation lawyer so he is out of the office a lot. Very often, the bosses’ wife would sit at his desk for a bit, and I often see her go through the emails. I didn’t want her to go through my private emails, so I stopped the downloads.

Of course, I had forgotten that the gmail setting needs to also be altered otherwise the forwarding process continues. Outlook on my office PC may have stopped pulling my emails from gmail but gmail continues to push them to my office PC.

Lo and behold on Monday morning I got a note from the Boss. He saw my online job portal subscriptions and scribbled a yellow stick-on note which said: Please disconnect from these subscriptions. Obviously someone trawled through my emails and disregarded the dozen or so jokes, articles and news services but zeroed in on these portal subscriptions.

Later that morning I went to see the Boss, told him these subscriptions were on my private emails and my private emails came to office only in the last 2-3 weeks due to my house purchase and move. He however, asked me to stop the subscriptions. He was the boss; I was “caught out” and was therefore nervous, so I said yes.

As I thought about it last night however, I thought I shouldn’t have said yes. I was wrong to have forwarded my private emails to office maybe, but what I did with my private emails was my private business, as long as I don’t bring them into office. Leaving aside the issue of whether he had the moral right to go through my emails, he certainly had no right to tell me to stop my subscription to these portals. In fact if I found out that my employees had these subscriptions, I would not be the least surprised, let alone bring the matter up with the employees. What is the difference for example between subscribing to these portals and buying the papers and scan through the Careers section? Can I not look? Can I not look at the Career ads in the papers while in office?

Returning now to the matter of bosses going through employees’ emails – I never had this experience, at least not to my knowledge. I certainly never saw my employees’ emails. He said it was to ensure no work matters are left unattended. But all of my clients knew I was away on Friday – I notified them. None of my clients even tried to contact me that day. When I had employees, it was a practice that they would inform their clients if they were away and if anything required attention, these clients were to contact a back-up person. This was the system and all of my clients would have contacted the Boss if anything required attention.

There is now a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m sure the Boss feels the same way. I haven’t done anything wrong but feel bad. I feel in fact, I have been wronged but the Boss was very negative yesterday. The relationship has never been an easy one and yesterday has made it worse. Why do I feel I am the guilty party here?