My computer was running a little slow this morning. This isn’t new; the company is notoriously terrible when it comes to technology. But after a solid two minutes waiting for my internet window to open, I asked my neighbor if hers was working.
She said that once she rebooted, it worked better.
I sat. I pondered. I wondered if I should.
Rebooting at work is dangerous. It takes about 20 minutes, and you risk getting a security patch update immediately following the reboot….requiring ANOTHER reboot. Which takes another twenty minutes. And that’s for people who have the “new” computers. The rest of us…who got “reimaged” (i.e., used) computers five years ago….face at least 45 minutes of waiting. Every time. And then another 45 minutes if a security patch is required.
But my internet still wasn’t working. So I thought it might be worth the risk. I shut down my computer. Chose “Restart” from the menu. Waited. Then signed in. Waited. Hit “OK” a few minutes later.
Waited.
Opened the internet. Yay! It worked. But then I noticed something.
Google Talk was blocked. (No chatting with my friends outside the company.)
Hmm. I tried another favorite site.
Someecards.com. Blocked. (No more hilarious, though slightly inappropriate, e-cards.)
Ummm. NOT cool.
Interesting and spot-on blog about my company (and its challenges), which was recently profiled in the Seattle PI. BLOCKED.
Seriously??
KEXP. Couchsurfing.com. TMZ. Pandora.
All blocked. Just since the reboot. Supposedly in the name of bandwidth preservation, cost saves, and efficiency.
(And I’m not even counting things like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, which have been blocked forever already.)
Uh huh. Awesome.
So now we have minimal amounts of work…our bosses are alternating between freaking out and faking optimism…coworkers are voluntarily (and not so voluntarily) leaving the company on a weekly basis…and to top it off, we can’t even send a someecard. Or see what day the KEXP BBQ falls on.
Perfect. Awesome. Great morale booster.
I’m seriously excited to go back to work tomorrow and see what else has been blocked.
Every day another story -
Sofie
