12:02 a.m. - 2003-02-21
ethics
Lunch was interesting yesterday. I bumped into one of the women I used to work with about six contracts ago. She was one of about half a dozen of us who used to enjoy working together on our tasks. I didn't realize she was part-time at the new company I'm working for. We agreed to get together for lunch in the next little while. Stopped at a dry goods store to pick up some new laces for my boots. Seems Miss Kitty chewed through them. Standing at the till, the women there were discussing the birth of one of their friend's baby just about three weeks ago. Of the five people standing there, four of us had birthdays on or within a day of the little one. The male customer wasn't telling.
E-mailed my supervisor - A - last night just to expand on the international law question from yesterday. I wanted to verify a couple of things before I passed that information on to him. The last thing I want is for him to take data that is inaccurate into a meeting he has to attend. Asked if he wanted to see any of the documentation I have. Response? Could he have a look at the material I would be receiving today from the ethics workshop I'm scheduled into? Sure.
The workshop was pretty well done. The first section - the expository part - was pretty dry and, to me, stated the obvious, but not everyone there had the same point of view. That came out in the case study exercises we did in the second half of the morning. Briefly, the five studies asked us to determine appropriate action in five different situations.
The first study was: being in an elevator with two senior executives who were discussing very confidential information. Question, should one take advantage of that information for personal gain or to help someone else improve theri finances. Of course not. Protracted discussion about whether to say something to the people in the elevator doing the talking. A lot of the people were afraid it would cost them their jobs. True, but a couple of contracts ago, the company I worked in had a similar scenario occur - locker room talk - costing them a major discovery worth hundreds of millions of dollars, minimum. The litigation will probably be protracted and very costly.
The second study was on the use of the companys' internet or e-mail. The question framed around passing on a questionable joke. Response was "when in doubt - don't". Third, what to do when perks are offered by a supplier. In this case it was more the issue of perception of impropriety that was in question. To paraphrase "Caesar's wife must be seen to be above suspicion." Fourth situation almost described the PC's behaviour down to a tee. D, one of my co-workers, was at the seminar too and I think he was a bit startled. It didn't occur to him that the company would also designate her behaviour as harrassing. Discussion centered around how everyone in a department should feel safe and respected. In the interim, it was agreed that giving the person in question some opportunities to alter their behaviour was also important. First, question of course is why are they behaving that way. Putting a bandage on an open cancer sore won't address the underlying illness - it just masks it. The final scenario involved taking the work of someone else, in this case a competitor's, and claiming it for your own. Theft of intellectual property. This was probably the most difficult of all the problems, because one has to determine where the boundary is between one's own knowledge, expertise, and skills as opposed to what belongs to a company that pays you to apply that knowledge - very difficult, generating some very interesting discussion.
After lunch, B came by and asked why I hadn't done a specific task a certain way. Well, I don't have the software on my computer to execute the research required and I hadn't been told to do it. She thought she had told me but I think she has forgotten an awful lot of things with her daughter being ill. Missing a key piece of software isn't something I would forget. Anyway, I fixed the data, without the software and went home.
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