User Un-Friendly

The company I'm working at now has a very restrictive internet policy. Most of the employees don't have internet access at all from their computers, and must use a centrally located pc, not connected to the company network, to go online. Being in IT, our guidelines are a little more lax. We are expected to "know better" when it comes to viruses, and much of our job requires the internet or at least is made easier by it. As a developer, I can spend all week reinventing the wheel, or I can spend a couple hours cruising the Dot Net forums and discover that someone has encounted and solved this problem already - and look! Their solution is more efficient than what I was going to do.

The company does use an internet filtering tool to prevent infection and increase productivity. It will automatically block access to sites that are not approved. It restricts access to all online web mail clients (category: Email), all ad banners (category: Ads/Banners - and I really don't miss them), general news sites, sexual content, games. All those sites that help employees waste time instead of working.

Overall, I don't much care. I understand why it's done. I've got a PDA phone, so I can access my personal email if I need to, and even browse the internet if I need to do something on my lunch hour at a prohibited site like gmail or Amazon. But the problem I've been running into is tech forums. I'm trying to work through a problem or issue that I'm having, I google the error message, find a result that looks promising and BAM! I'm blocked. The tech forum in question is blocked, category: Chat. grrrr. I'll go through several searches without encountering this problem, then suddenly get blocked on a really promising post. Generally I move on, but if I'm having trouble finding posts that really address my particular issue, I get really frustrated when that one perfect result is blocked as Chat.

The other day, I did a search and found a likely candidate. I clicked through and found that the forum was written in French. Sure, I could understand the code, but not the explanation. So I went back to the Google results and clicked "translate this page".

And that is when it happened. I got blocked. And I got blocked with the best, most descriptive, accurate and telling category of all. One that made perfect sense and completely described my feelings at this entire filtering process.



Exactly.