Surf Nazis Must Die

The guardians of productivity and deniers of information at The Bank have blocked my personal website. What I find astonishing is that the Pirates, Steelers and Penguins sport team websites, surely responsible for more wasted time bank-wide than my little website could every hope for, are still readily available. As are a number flash game sites.

So, what methodology do the Internet Nazis use to determine which sites are not business related and are slated for blockage? Why do the handful of webcomics and my own innocuous website get blocked when other more egregious offenders are not? Well, in the case of the sport sites, I suspect that executive staff have something to do with it.

Years ago, Instant Messenger (IM) was used a lot. The network people looked at the ports IM used as a security risk and blocked them. Executives that used IM for whatever reason made a stink and the ports were opened up again. This cycled back and forth several times before The Bank purchased licenses for Lotus's Sametime application, apparently more secure than IM.

So, with these sport sites, I suspect that if they were blocked, some executive would make some sort of stink about it and, even though it has no conceivable business purpose, because he is an executive he gets what he wants. I've seen this double standard happen before. A lawyer for the CEO was having a hardware problem with his laptop. Even though he was at home he demanded that a ticket be opened even though I told him that the hardware contractors not only weren't going to service his machine on a weekend but they weren't going to go to his home. When the hardware group closed the ticket for the reasons I just described, the exec's lawyer called back and made the same demands. He made such a stink up and down the line that eventually an analyst from the Help Desk went to his home to work on the issue. This violated all sorts of contractual agreements but the execs didn't care. Even when it was they who had agreed to and probably signed those agreements.

It's the double standard that irks me the most about this. These guys don't see this as unethical behavior.

That, and they've blocked Wikipedia, too.