Home worker gets verbal warning for gaming on break despite switching to their own PC

pcgamer.com:

Imagine discovering your boss had somehow been listening to everything you did and said, even outside of meetings and phone calls. How fired would you be? Okay, so it's a little far-fetched for most, but these are the fears of one Redditor, whose boss found out they were playing video games on their lunch break, and gave them a verbal warning for it.

Recyyklops posted on r/antiwork after they received the warning for simply spending one of their lunch breaks winding down, playing some video games… because why not? Usually there aren't official rules for what you can and can't do on your break, although reading through some of the comments, I may have just been really lucky with my bosses.

Since they've been working for a call centre, OP says their work laptop has been loaded with a software called five9—a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. «In this software, managers are able to listen in on calls, even when you are on hold,» they explain. But that doesn't explain why their boss could hear them playing games on their break.

«I am not in the phone or chat queue, so that tells me that she is able to just listen to me all the time? Being on break aside, is that even legal without telling me? Now I just feel weirded out not knowing if they are just sitting there listening to me.»

A quick search of five9 didn't turn up any similar complaints about the software. In fact, it scored a 7.7 out of 10 on Trustradius, though I'm not sure how many reviews there are made by low-level employees.

Of course, there's always the potential that OP was screaming profanities in the middle of the office, which someone overheard and told their boss who covered for them. Or the boss might just have been walking past and assumed they