“The reputation of a thousand years is determined by the conduct of one hour.” With this opening, Max Whisler, director to the UW Internal Audit department, shared the latest information about the ethical use of email and the Internet at the November Leader’s Event.

What not to do includes some of the following:

• Conducting an outside business during working hours—like preparing records for a privately owned business during the work day.
• Using email for politics—like emailing a congressman or lobbying people to vote in a particular way.
• Using email for a commercial purpose—like selling Mary Kay cosmetics or Amway products.
• Downloading prohibited files—like MP3 files to listen to music or to view pornography.
• Removing state equipment from work for your personal use—like taking a laptop computer home to do your taxes.
• Making a personal long distance phone call on a UW phone line, even if you volunteer to repay the cost.

But Max did point out there are some non-business uses of email and the Internet which are ok. You can:

• Have a personal web page on a UW server, you just can’t use it to market any business or service.
• Use email to check to see if children have arrived home from school, make a medical/dental appointment or check with a spouse.
• Send 1 or 2 brief personal emails during each work day.
• Play games at lunch and on break as long as the games are pre-installed on the computer.

The discussion was filled with many examples and levels of reprimand, but the overriding message was simple, “If you don’t want your mother to read about it in tomorrow’s Seattle Times…Don’t do it.”

For more detail, check out the site, “Personal Use of State Resources,” at http://www.washington.edu/admin/hr/pol.proc/conflict.interest.html. You can also ask your supervisor for further clarification.