On a slow Friday, complain if you want, just don’t go surfing

Chris Prevatt seems a little unhappy. Possibly bored. I caught him on a work break in the middle of Friday afternoon, taking temporary relief from a PowerPoint presentation on how Orange County is spending tobacco-settlement revenue. Later in the day, he was scheduled to go to a job site and investigate a complaint that people were smoking inside a company.

“Are you happy at work?” I eventually ask.

“I like the people I work with,” Prevatt says, “but not the fact that I don’t really have anything to do.”

What he means is that he doesn’t have enough to do to fill up the typical workday.

And that may explain, in at least partial detail, how the county employee found himself sideways with his bosses. Any day now, Prevatt expects to be officially reprimanded for using company time to surf the Internet. Another allegation -- that he used company time to work on his personal political blog -- may or may not figure into things, he says.

In the grand scheme of things, this is pretty small potatoes. Prevatt says he’s been led to believe his bosses aren’t contemplating suspension or dismissal or a job reclassification.

That doesn’t mean he’s happy or will roll over like some whimpering dog.

Prevatt, 45, thinks the move to bust his chops is because his blog took a shot at a county supervisor and because one of the officials in the Health Care Agency, where he works, doesn’t like him. I’m going to assume they will deny that and, this late on a Friday afternoon, it’s not worth digging into.

Unless Prevatt gets fired, of course.

“My understanding is they’re going to do a written reprimand,” he says. Whatever stress he’s feeling, he says, stems from the 35 days or so that he’s been waiting for his punishment.

I guess you could argue that reprimanding an employee for non-work-related computer time sends a powerful message to other employees.

I guess.

Unbowed, Prevatt is under the impression that lots of American workers surf the Net during work hours. I have no idea where he gets that notion.

I ask if he thinks he should spend taxpayer time for his blog. “Actually, I don’t,” he says. “It’s not something that should be done from a county computer.”

He confesses only to making a quick note on his work computer about something he wanted to blog about. That probably took a minute or so of county time, but his supervisors said the entire blog that later appeared on his site was on the county computer. That’s because, Prevatt says, he wrote the item on his lunch break.

As for surfing the Net during the workday? Guilty, he says, while quickly noting he hasn’t visited any “inappropriate” sites. However, he’s checked out other blogs, local newspapers and national news outlets to stimulate ideas, he says. “It’s part of the reality of being bored with nothing to do,” he says.

That’s not the ol’ college spirit we want from county employees, but Prevatt apparently doesn’t mind bursting my bubble.

He says it isn’t reasonable to put an employee in front of a computer with no work to do and not expect that person to start cruising.

“You pull any employee’s computer in the county and you’re going to find they visited Internet sites that are not work-related,” he says.

Wait a minute, bud.

That’s a pretty serious charge. Are you telling me that the district attorney, the sheriff, the department heads ... might sometimes use their computers for non-work matters?

Here at this newspaper, everyone sits in front of a computer. I find it impossible to believe any colleague would ever surf the Internet during the workday. Unless, of course, it was work-related.

It’s just that we have a very broad definition of “work-related.”

I’m not here to light a candle for Prevatt. A nine-year county employee, he says he’ll probably be looking for a new job in another year or so. He’s feeling needlessly roughed up over the computer incident and says he doesn’t plan to get over it anytime soon.

Feeling the need to let him get back to work, I bid Prevatt good-bye.

I don’t think I made him feel any better about his job. But luckily for us taxpayers, his supervisors are keeping a sharp eye on him.