In today’s new Ask Bing section, a reader writes in to complain about his boss. Seems the guy spends a lot of time surfing porn sites at the office. He wants to know what he and his fellow employees can do about this deplorable situation.

Of course looking at objectionable, sexist, nasty porn at the office is a no-no. Worse than that, even, is the fact that the dangerous pervert is so indiscreet that his employees know about it. Good for them, the little weasels, for squealing on the miscreant, right?

Well… I don’t know. Really. A lot of people surf the web every day tracking the value of their portfolio, priapic (if they are men) or flushed with pleasure (if they are women) as their tiny greed muscles expand and contract. Is that any less pornographic? Isn’t money the new porn?

In my time in Planet Corporate, I have occasionally done a bunch of questionably recreational things at my desk, while, I may add, building one of the most successful business careers of anybody in my mysterious line of work. I’m not bragging. I’m just saying.

The computer is a weird window on the world, and an antidote to the perpetual state of boredom that is the bane of office life. Mostly, I’ve played computer games by the hundreds while writing, talking on the phone, signing things, waiting for the next s**tstorm.

I started with a dungeons game on what was called a Lexitron. I think it was called Gorp. Something like that. No… Zork! That was it. There were no graphics, but I followed a text-based troll down a myriad of caves and passageways, dying and being reborn as I went. After that came Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, The Rise of the Triad, Tetris, and so on and so forth. Right now, I’m addicted to Big Fish Games, which offers something called Zen that incorporates a visual kind of Sudoku and an evolved Mahjong game. I play when I’m on the phone. It IS kind of Zen, come to think of it. And which of us couldn’t use more of that?

I’ve joined virtual communities from way back, like the late 80s, believe it or not. Each of us had an early form of Avatar that you could build using facial parts as you would right now in Second Life. I went on those until it got weird. There were no webmasters in those days to kick off psychos. More recently, I joined Second Life, which I found so unbelievably tedious that I quit after only a couple of weeks. It compared unfavorably to a typical day of conversation at the office. Congratulations to people who have found a way to make that world interesting or, more important, profitable. My virtual hat is off to you guys.

I’ve also consistently kept up with gossip sites that report on the doings of idiots, the news destinations that report half-truths about my business, wrote my first novel, basically, while the rest of the corporation was being acquired and the only strategy was to be very, very quiet while the McKinsey types were hunting wabbits, stuff like that. I’m sure there’s more but I have to go in a minute because my phone is ringing.

I know a woman who has the #3 job in a very large corporation. She’s doing extremely well. Her desktop is a playground of game icons stretching back into the dawn of the computer era. I think I saw Pac-Man on there once. There is no time that she’s not in the middle of a game no matter what else she is doing. Is there something wrong with that?

As long as we’re functional, is there anything wrong with keeping ourselves amused, entertained, even aroused, as long as it doesn’t intrude on our effectiveness or (in the case of porn, I guess) our ability to manage others? Even galley slaves were able to use their oars to scratch their backs. Was that an unauthorized use of equipment?

How about you guys? Huh? What kind of unauthorized use of the hardware are YOU involved in? Do you play games on your phone? Do you text message your kids or your lover every couple of hours? Do you look at naughty pictures? Do you forward YouTube clips of dancing birds to your friends via company e-mail?

Come on. Enquiring minds want to know.

He wants you to present him with a solution for every problem.

As you may know if you’ve dropped in this week, I’m in Los Angeles doing “business,” which is pretty much what everybody does out here. It’s a funny place. Between driving and taking meetings in restaurants, people are at their desks, I would estimate, about 34% less of the time than in an other major city in the nation. Add to that the X-Factor involved in the time difference with the rest of Planet Capitalism and you just have a different thing going on out here. And if you think people are busting their humps after 3 PM in LA, the way the East Coast guys are doing at that hour in New York or Chicago, you’ve got another thing coming. At 4:00 PM in Los Angeles, the sense of being off the clock is almost palpable. I’m not saying they don’t do anything. I’m just saying I like the vibe.

Anyhow, that made the phone call I got from Larry even more annoying. It came at 3:45, when I was playing a new game from Big Fish on the computer and checking my email in a desultory fashion. Larry is in New York, so he was working late, good for him, blah blah blah. “Stan,” he says, and I can hear in his voice he’s in some kind of freakout about something, as usual. “I want to give you a heads-up about something.” Now, this also bugs me extremely. I hate heads-ups. A heads-up is something people use when they didn’t tell the boss early enough about a terrible thing for the boss to do something about it. I have told my people that yeah, I want to be informed if something is going to happen, but I would like to know about bad stuff early, not in a heads-up at the end of the day. So Larry, for one, keeps offering them to me, which shows he doesn’t listen, among everything else.

“So anyway,” says Larry, and presents me with a very big problem that could create a very bad precedent in our company. You don’t care what it is. I could make up some stuff about it, but the bottom line is that there’s a situation, and if we don’t dig ourselves out of it we’re going to come out looking bad, and probably lose some money. Close your eyes and imagine a situation like that for yourself, and that’s what I’m talking about.

“So Larry,” I say to him. “Don’t you think we should step in and do something about it?” And there’s this silence, and then he says, “That’s why I called you.”

See, that’s what I don’t like about Larry. I mean, I’m not going to fire him or anything because he’s a pretty good manager and what the hell. I don’t fire people unless they completely spit up on their shoes. But he’s definitely on my B-List. Because all Larry does is present me with problems. He never comes to me with a problem in one hand and a gleaming, shiny solution in the other. And that’s what I want. You know why? Because I generally don’t know any better than Larry what to do about things. Just because I’m the boss doesn’t make me a genius, obviously. As the guy closer to the scenario, HE’s the one who should have a few ideas. Why dump it all in my lap?

I’ve got a few people working for me around the country. The guys I like are the ones that say, “Hey, our building out here is about to blow up, but I think if I cut the red wire first and then the green wire I can defuse it,” and then all I have to do is say, “Sure, do that, and hurry.” And then there’s no explosion and I can go back to doing what executives do. I think you know what that means.

So I told Larry what to do, and he did it, and fortunately things worked out okay. That doesn’t change the fact that when Larry calls next time, I’m going to be presented with a problem that has no solution that I’m not going to provide for it. And when I see “Larry” on my Caller ID, I will not smile.

I complained about this to Peter, who works for me out here. He has quite a few reportees reporting to him, too, in the reporting structure. “I know what you mean,” he said, sipping on the Starbucks double espresso with some kind of foam that everybody has surgically attached to their hand out here. “Last month I sent out a memo to my whole staff telling them that I would kill the next person who sent me an e-mail that ended with the phrase, ‘How would you like to handle the situation?’ These people are paid to come up with creative solutions, not just pass along problems to me!”

I like the way Pete is developing as an executive. One day, if he keeps on this track, he may present me with the ultimate solution to any boss’s biggest problem: finding his own replacement.