Big Brother in the Bathroom

10/30/2005

Many years ago I worked at a large telecomm company where employees had to use mag stripe access cards to enter and exit the offices.

No big problem there, except that the bathrooms were located outside our corporate area, so the end result was that They could time your bathroom breaks, at least indirectly.

But now Ford Motor has taken that a step further and is now expliticly monitoring trips to the lavatory in one of their plants.

Fortunately, the folks over at DaimlerChysler are taking a more enlightened approach, and are saying they will not follow Ford’s lead.

“We’re not gonna use a stopwatch, turning a natural function into an Olympic sport,” said Jason Vines, VP of communications at DaimlerChysler, via the corporate blog. “That … would just be … well … too anal.”

Indeed.