Because you asked

Reader-submitted complaint: You blog at work.

No, I don't. This is a personal blog. It's all about me. I maintain it on my own time, using a computer that I own, and I write about my own personal opinions and experiences. I write about work all day long, into the night and half of the weekend, and I honestly have no interest in blogging about it when I finally get home.

(SPECIAL NOTE TO READERS WHO HAPPEN TO BE MY BOSS: Sorry, but it's true.)

I don't personally do it, but I am not opposed to blogging at work as long as people get their work done. I'm not even opposed to blogging about what happens on the job, within reason. In fact, some of my favourite northern bloggers often mention their 9-5 lives. I'm glad that they love their work so much that they want to share those experiences with the world. I love my job just as much as they do, but I set up this blog so I would be able to write about the other things that interest me. I write about work for hours every day. This space is mine.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you what I do in my office that has any relation to this blog.

I read comments and sometimes respond to them. Comments to this blog come in on an RSS feed, so I get an automatic notification when someone leaves me a message. I usually read comments within a few hours of the time you leave them, but sometimes I don't get around to checking the feed because I'm too busy. I'm not ignoring you; I'm just distracted because work is my priority while I'm at work. Sometimes I'm at work on weekends or into the evening: again, I'm not ignoring you, I'm just too busy to respond right away.

I read blogs on my RSS feed and add them to my sidebar. I usually refresh the list with new posts about once a day. Again, sometimes I don't get to this.

I sometimes get ideas for new posts. In the first year or so, I used to save ideas in Blogger: I'd open a new post, write a sentence or two to remind me what I wanted to write about, and save it as a draft. I later realised that when I did this, my posts were published with a time stamp showing the time I started the draft (11:03 a.m. and so on). I stopped doing this because I figured that eventually someone would accuse me of blogging at work. Now that I think about it, I could have used the "post options" menu to change the time stamp. I really should go back to doing this. It was a good system.

I check my site meter. If you're on my site, I know who you are, where you came from and what you did. To pick an example at random, you might obsessively reload my site all day and do searches for words related to yourself. I know you did this. Or you might decide to read every post I've ever written. I know you did this, too. I can even tell if you're at work when you did it. Really, you shouldn't spend hours looking at my blog while you're at work, but that's between you and your boss.

No, I don't blog at the office. It usually takes about an hour to do one of my longer posts; although I sometimes have lulls in my work, I almost never have an entire hour with nothing to do. If I did have that much free time, I probably wouldn't sit in my office, I'd eat a sandwich and read the Paper of Record.

Thanks for your complaint.