One of the more remarkable things about Falstaff is that employees have more-or-less been given free reign when it comes to our computers. We can install what we want. We can surf the Internet to and from wherever we want.
That is until recently.
Due to some fluke, I cannot access certain sites on the web without going through a proxy. I am relatively confident that it wasn’t something crafted by IT. The sites being blocked are not particular problematic ones. It just so happens, however, that one of the sites blocked is Hit Coffee. So posting from work and whatnot will be pretty limited until they get this fixed.
On a side note, in real life my boss Willard and my webmaster Webster have the same first name. Willard’s name is first alphabetically and so when I thought that Hit Coffee was completely down, I almost emailed Willard to inquire about it.
That would have been bad.
Moving on, when I brought up the idea of utilizing Instant Messaging to help the team communicate more easily, he informed me that the company was looking in to disabling IM. Well, their plan is to prevent all IMing outside the company, but since even messages from one desk to the desk next to it go outside the internal network, I’m not sure it’s going to work how they think it is. IT seems optomistic.
So in the interest of smokin’em while you got’em, I invite any and all of my readers for a limited time (when they cut us off at the end of the month) to Instant Message me. My AIM name is K U M E D E I N… without the spaces.
I just don’t understand companies that preoccupy themselves with trying to impose restrictions when the work is getting done. Employees will always find ways to goof off, and it’s between them and their boss if there’s a problem with their quality.
Comment by Becky — January 24, 2006 @ 11:16 pm
Yeah, I talked about it with Simon today. Net surfing is much worse than messaging. But I think IMing is an easier target due to our lamebrained HR manager.
Comment by trumwill — January 25, 2006 @ 1:44 am
[…] lement a Policy
Filed under: Office — trumwill @ 12:54 am
The long-awaited Instant Messaging limitations are now upon us. Sort of. As I had suspected, they were unable to stop IMs […]
Pingback by Hit Coffee » How Not To Implement a Policy — February 17, 2006 @ 1:12 am