Judging by a recent story on Job Schmob about a woman who spends company time updating her MySpace page with modelling pictures, I reckon that an employee who spends exorbant amounts of time on a social networking site is fairly common.  Take this bloke in the UK for example, who spent 4 hours a day of paid company time on Facebook.com, a social networking site like MySpace:

A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period. That works out to about 4 hours per day.   

The cool thing about Charlie's story was that the IT team cut him some slack when they found out what he was doing.  They sent him a nice little e-mail about his surfing practices and informing him that they were'nt going to notify his manager about it this time.  The e-mail went on to warn him that, should he continue visiting Facebook, "subsequent offenses will be treated with more severity and through the appropriate official channels."

So what does our pal Charlie do?  He posts the letter on his Facebook page!  He posts it as a badge of honor letting his friends know that he's proud of the fact that he got scolded. Moreover, he writes that he's more concerned about losing his Facebook account than he is his job. 

Priorities, people!  Social networking sites (other than JobSchmob.com of course) are not more important than your job!  Make an idiot move like Charlie and you're going to be forever known as the immature chap who cared more about his attachment to a personal web page than he did a job at a place like Goldman Sachs. 

To be sure, a job is indeed worth giving up for your life, your family, your sanity or your health. But there's a difference between giving up a job for one of the important parts of life and giving up a job for a web page where you post pictures of how cool you can look when you wear sunglasses and pout at the camera.  Even Job Schmob would fire a guy like that!

I would be willing to bet that our self-destructive friend Charlie was addicted to Facebook.com and that it became a powerful obsession. Truthfully though, eventhough I think his addiction was behind the wheel, Charlie sounds like he had his foot planted firmly on the gas pedal.

Talk about it:  Do you know people like this?  Have you beaten a similar addiction?  Do you know someone who's gotten fired for spending time on a site like MySpace, Second Life or Facebook?