Give me gmail or give me death!

Hello wonderful people, this is Arielle from Good things come to those who whine, keeping you entertained in Heidi’s absence. I don’t know if anyone else has this problem, but Heidi’s blog is the one and only blog that is blocked at my office. When I tried to go to it once, it said my access is restricted because of “Adult content.” Really? Is there hidden porn here?

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the blog being blocked, since my uber conservative mega-corporation blocks pretty much everything. There are the obvious ones like all webmail, all forms of instant messaging, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and, well, porn. But there are some less obvious ones in there, such as Youtube and all forms of photo sites like webshots, flickr, etc. So if, for example, my coworker wants to share pictures of our other coworker’s wedding, she has to send around a huge email with all the pictures as attachments, instead of just sending us a link to the website. Because shutterfly counts as “personal storage” and apparently that’s one of many evils we aren’t allowed access to. LAME.

During the World Cup a year or 2 ago, some higher up deliberately had IT block websites where you could stream from sports channels, because they didn’t want employees watching the games when they should have been working. This didn’t bother me since I didn’t care, but a lot of people were pretty peeved about it. Some lucky person figured out a work around, and immediately sent it to everyone else on his floor. I work in HR, so I sit in a land of cubicles where it’s pretty quiet. This employee, however, sat down on the trading floor where there are an assload of people really close together. So when I went down there to meet with someone during the World Cup, my meeting would be intermittently interrupted by hundreds of people cheering. I was glad they were able to watch the games, but seriously, way to keep it on the DL guys.

Another example of an employee uprising against blocked websites was when they decided to block evite. SERIOUSLY? The justification was that people would use it to message each other through the RSVP section. A ton of people complained, saying that if they were going to put in 12 hours a day for the company, giving themselves enough time to go home, eat dinner and go to bed (and NOT to check their personal email accounts, which, again, they can’t check at work), they should at least be able to see the invitation to their friend’s birthday party. And after realizing how ridiculous they were being, we were given back our evite. Woohoo!

One final website blocking story. Awhile ago, my friend and I were going to meet for drinks after work on Friday. I waited in my office for her to get out of the subway. She called me and said she forgot the exact address of the bar, and asked if I would look it up on www.drinkdeals.com. I typed it in, and immediately saw the BLOCKED page. Reason: adult content. WHAT? I looked at the address bar and saw that I had been automatically redirected to lesbianpages.com. Panic ensued. I tried again, being very careful to type in D.R.I.N.K.D.E.A.L.S. Again, lesbian pages. I had a momentary freakout, sure that the IT police were going to storm down the hall and fire me for trying to look at gay porn. But thankfully, nothing ever happened because of it and I am still unfortunately employed there today. The end.

While I’ve certainly learned how to entertain myself when bored at work, even without email or IM, I’m definitely counting down the days (54!) until I leave my corporate job to go back to grad school. Gmail all day, every day? Hook me up!