Beaten down by The Man
My workplace has always had a pretty hefty firewall... for example, I could never go to Nerve, or any Geocities sites, or check my home email (or any other common email sites: Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.). Recently, they did away with any outside messenger services, like AIM or MSN Messenger, and only allow an intranet messenger to use with other people at work. Often, my friends' emails don't get to me because they have been screened and discarded.

But new developments have taken the cake. I can no longer visit Friendster. It was catagorized as "Dating" and therefore firewalled. I can no longer visit KEXP, which was categorized as "MP3 Sites." What?! Hello?! Since when? It's just a college radio station! I doubt that anyone here but me uses it, and I've never downloaded anything from it. No more John in the Morning for me. I'm so sad.

Not to mention that, because of some sort of OSHA program we're volunteering for, I can no longer have a radio/CD player on my desk, even though corporate policy states that we can have a small radio on our desk! I was told to use my system's CD player instead, but I use my computer to listen to calls and audit them, so I can't have radio/CD player and the call program on at the same time. Plus, they just axed my radio station.

As Ryan put it, "Dude, what the hell is wrong with the place you work?"

I wish I knew.