It’s true. Just this week the unthinkable happened. The old-fashioned, clueless, heartless, SOB that runs my company had his IT department put the mother of all firewall, filter, padlock, security alarm protected, deadbolts on our network. We were prepared for it during a company meeting. One of the many recent converts to the idea that the Internet is nothing more than a toy that will squelch productivity and lure people into the darkest and seediest corners of the World Wide Web. At first we were told that HR (the watchdog, judge, and jury for our web browsing) would be making sure not too much time was spent online, and that employees were not going to naughty sites. They were also going to be looking for “trends”, i.e.; Sally was on jobacle.com for four minutes one morning… perhaps it could slide, but if Sally felt the urge to spend those four minutes of company time every morning at jobacle.com reading the latest blog during her morning joe, well, Sally was gonna have some splainin’ to do.
This amount of control was not good enough. Drunk on their own power and descending ever deeper into the world of network communism, they decided to do away with any file sharing in iTunes, turned off IMing, and made it impossible to download any podcasts.
Maybe now would be a good time to tell you that I work for a production company. We produce promos, commercials, television shows, print ads, and just about any other creative task one could think of in the media realm. Sites like MySpace (this I could care less about) and YouTube have been blocked completely. This has drastically change our productivity and has obviously put a major damper on moral; especially since there was no abuse of the Internet privilege. Furthermore, it has slowed workflow, caused more headaches, and wasted more time and effort than it seems worth. We work primarily with outside clients that are all using these tools- yes tools- to get their job done. Just this afternoon I had to shrug my shoulders while an irate producer watched me NOT retrieve the voice over reads (as I sat on the phone with the voice talent in Toronto try to come up with a work around) all because I couldn’t hop onto his FTP site and download the audio files I needed to continue my job. Needless to say we all had to jump through several hoops to complete the task.
The Internet in the workplace is still a relatively new way to do business. The problem is sometimes it takes far too long for someone from a bygone generation to keep up with the ever-changing times. They often wind up going to great lengths to fight off an inevitable change, like say… using the Internet as a work tool! The problem is this guy, like so many before him, and so many to come, just can’t stand the thought of people enjoying themselves on the job and worse; wasting valuable time loafing around the Web. The problem is that the very technology that they are trying to take away is the same technology that gave us so much free time to begin with. It used to be that an eight to 10 hour day was chewed up by all the menial day-to-day tasks like writing and rewriting letters and memos. Not to mention copying, envelope stuffing, stamp licking, and actually mailing them out. Billing, payroll, research, and every other task has been affected by the Internet. The new technology too, is constantly evolving. For instance, a recent poll showed that e-mail is now viewed by many as an outdated form of communication. Chatting and texting now garner much faster results; not to mention the bonus perk of not paying a long distance phone charge every time you have to ask a co-worker in a another region a question.
The fact is that this is something I could write 10 more blogs about. This one has already gone on for far too long. Clearly many points on this topic have yet to be made not to mention the fact that I still haven’t looked at the other side. Having said that now would be a great time for you to weigh in. What do you think about this growing trend? Has it happened to you at your job? Do you work for a company that still sees no need to even have the Internet in your office? We in the trenches need to start having these discussions now or before long we’ll be working on computers that only allow us access to Web sites determined to be work related by God knows who.
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