Years ago when I interviewed at Google, upon walking into reception, I was required to sign an NDA which stated that I wouldn't tell anyone about my interview, and that I had not told anyone I was interviewing.

I was kind of stranded in Mountain View unless they schlepped me back to the airport because I happened to be flat broke when they flew me out, so I just signed it, but I consider it laughably the craziest, most paranoid, least binding NDA I have ever signed.

Talk about Duress. ;)

This is always good to remember. HR exists to protect the company, not as charity to employees.

Same with legal/in-house counsel.

This is something that a significant amount of people do not understand. The fiduciary duty in this situation runs to the company not to individual employees.

I seemed to have read that in such contradictions, these ambiguities are resolved in the favor of the one who didn't draft the documents ie the employee in this case. But i'm also surprised HR wouldn't discuss with their legal counsel.

I would assume that signing a (legally valid) variation of your contract would override the company policy - Though it is a shockingly bad oversight on HR's part maybe the CEO ought to put the HR director and or the General Consul on a Performance Improvement Plan.

It's interesting to me how many companies expect you to sign an employment agreement that contains terms that you've just broken in the agreement with your previous employer to go work for them.

Couldn't you simply write a disclaimer next to your signature?

"My acceptance of the previous terms requires the following company policy to be waived:

- Watching pornography at work is grounds for termination."

This is silly. Seeking out and watching porn is not the same thing as accidentally seeing porn because it arrived as spam or whatever.

With this line of reasoning you could say that when person A is caught looking at porn by person B, both should be fired because B happened to see the same porn over A's shoulder.

If you intercept porn and delete it, you're doing your job. If you retain it somewhere and go back to look at it, then you're just looking at porn, violating company rules.

You are correct (except possibly about the "silly" part). But if the official policy doesn't make that distinction, then I think there is still a problem.

I know which party I think is the asshole (the HR flack). But I'm not sure which one you think is.

It was a quote from The Big Lebowski. Out of context it's odd.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes?item=qt0464814