Porn in the workplace equals P45 in the pay packet

It turns out that looking at porn in the office and then emailing the video clips of THREE GIRL LIVE ACTION! around to all your colleagues is not really 'the done thing'.

Furthermore it seems you can even be sacked these days for just such a team building exercise. Well it was nice of somebody to tell us.

It wasn't that long ago that we all received an email which originated in the offices of City law firm Norton Rose. You know the one, about Claire Swire. Now what was wrong with that? A bit of harmless fun, right?

It even looked for a minute like the Norton Rose employees were set for the sack until common sense prevailed.

You'd have to say that would have been an overreaction. After all, what harm could it possibly do Norton Rose having half the western world know it employed a bunch of potty-mouthed smut-peddlers?

Then there was Dell - sacking a man just for sending a senior female exec some explicit pictures of a sexual nature (talk about sense of humour failure).

Then HP added to the misery and shelved 100 sweaty-palmed workers. Why? For no reason other than the fact they were using the corporate email system for distributing porn to one another. Was it their fault that they accidentally included a senior board member on one of their flesh-laden mail shots?

And now the whole world's gone discipline crazy. More people are now disciplined by their bosses for email abuse than they are for stealing stationery.

You just take a couple of hours out of every day to look at some smutty sites and the next thing you know, you're on the job scrapheap - without so much as a warning. And you can bet you probably weren't even given enough time to burn your favourite MPEGs to CD or nick some boxes of biros and post-it notes on your way out.