Filters

I'm getting tired. I used to be able to come to this job and surf around and catch up with the world. For the longest time, they didn't have a filter on the internet but then they put one in. Okay, fine, block porn. I get it. Then they started blocking some other things - minor to begin with. Games. Okay, I get it. Maybe we're using a lot of productive work time playing games.

However, we work in a call center. Work comes to us. We don't call out - the calls come in. We started out with ringing phones but they changed that, too. Now we have headsets that beep when a call comes in. That means you never know when it's coming - you're sitting there, talking to your neighbor and your ear beeps. The caller hears the last 1/2 second of your conversation because the Pavlovian response isn't quite strong enough to respond within 1/2 second.

So, there is downtime, when people aren't calling in. Can you believe that they told us to use this time to study? Study what? The codes that we use everyday? That we memorize because we use them 20 times (or more) a day? What's to study?

Then they started filtering more. Image sites, for the most part - tinypic, photobucket, etc. You know, the places where most people post images for their blogs because that's what these services do. Then they started blocking more sites - more image sites - Flickr, etc. Then even more. Now they're up to Blogger and virtually every site for "Personal Backup and Storage" which is just about everything.

Facebook, Twitter - blocked. Virtually everywhere you go on the internet, you can't get to.

WHAT IS THE POINT?

There is this awesome service called Circumventor which is done by the Peacefire folks at Peacefire.org. It's great. I can get just about anywhere. But it's not perfect - it's running things through a proxy so Flash games don't work and sometimes there are some quirky things. Peacefire also has a program you can install and put on your computer at home to make a local Circumventor. I had it set up at one point but it's relatively difficult to run.

Now I'm off to call people in to work because the people during the week can't schedule for the weekends. This is the 3rd? week in a row that I've had to call people in. I don't understand why they can't schedule more people to work. In fact, I just looked yesterday and found that somebody THAT THEY JUST HIRED TO WORK THE WEEKENDS WAS MOVED TO A WEEKDAY ONLY POSITION. WHAT. THE. FUCK?

Can you tell I'm angry?