Coitus Interruptus a Growing Problem for American Workers

July 26, 2028 - Should an employee get paid for checking her office videomail on her broadband wristwatch while having sex with her husband?  What if she has to take a call from her boss over her earrings in the middle of foreplay?

A dispute at Big Media. Inc., (BM) over paying five programmers when they’re working remotely while simultaneously getting it on raises these questions and creates new and heated issues for American corporations.

BM proposed that the five new employees would not be compensated for using their portable communications devices during intercourse. The union, the Geek Guild of America, objected.

“Simply checking office videomail or voicemail is not our big concern,” said Dilton Sneed, executive director of the Geek Guild. “Our folks are professionals. They’re not going to start putting in overtime slips for a couple of minutes of work at home. Our concern is that if people get interrupted in the height of passion, they be duly compensated for it.”

With mobile chips now embedded in everything from wedding rings to marital aids, the ability to work remotely keeps expanding all the time, and is raising a host of issues involving fair compensation, says celebrity lawyer Mia Deah-Hoare.

“The simple question of what work is has been evolving throughout this century,” Deah-Hoare said. “Once it was just a question of whether you should paid for checking your Blackberry at the dinner table.  But now, people can be in touch with the office no matter what they’re doing at home or in a sleazy hotel room.”

In the BM case, a compromise was reached that would allow the workers to be paid for using their communications devices after hours in certain instances.

The issue is not so much tapping out a brief message on a handheld, Deah-Hoare said, but the fact that modern technology makes people pretty much accessible anytime, anywhere.

“Technology is going to continue to move in this direction, to the point where the chips are embedded directly in our brains so we don’t even need devices” Deah-Hoare said. “It was important to us to make it clear that were not going to be unpaid when we’re interrupted during a romp in the hay.”

But productivity expert Ruth Leslie Overlord said she has little patience for the employees’ arguments. First of all, most geeks rarely get sex and should only have to worry about interruptions from work if they’re pleasuring themselves, the best-selling author said.

And secondly, “every employee wastes time at work,” Overlord said. “They make personal video calls, they socialize, they watch porn on their wrist watches. So I don’t believe an employer is being unreasonable if he or she summons them when they’re in the middle of an orgasm.”