Big Brother is Alive and Well!

Well, there's no way I can top TwiKiwi50's post - especially since mine is NOT going to have a happy ending. However, in the spirit of true whining, I hope you'll join me on this journey...

This past week has been a bit of a pain in the proverbials, to be honest. It kind of all started when I had three days off work at the beginning of the month due to a chest infection, and then spent all of last Friday catching up on unread emails and jobs that needed doing in the office. At the time I thought nothing of the fact that my internet connection was acting suspiciously...

Okay, so this is NOT what I want to see...

This week, however, it intrigued me. On Monday morning I arrived at work, logged on, checked urgent emails and diary appointments, then turned to my second PC and clicked the normal buttons that allow me to circumnavigate the firewall (required behaviour, if you don't want everything you do to be monitored by our rather dubious Security Manager). I then launched Internet Explorer (yes, we're quite traditional where I work) and clicked on my Google icon. Result: Nothing. Nada. Zilch. It simply would not load.

Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth from my side of the office...

Why the f*ck can't I get logged on? I need to check my Twittah Feed!

On Tuesday, I tried again. With the same result...

On Wednesday we had a team meeting. Item 3 on the agenda was an update from the Systems team (I work in Applications...). "So," our manager announces. "Marshall has successfully been replaced by Bloxx and will be used company-wide from now on. Marshall is being decommissioned today."

What? WHAT?!!! Why wasn't I given any notice??? (For those of you who may not know: Marshall and Bloxx are super-strength web-filtering options adopted by companies to protect them from virus attacks and inappropriate surfing.)

Now, I may not be the most important person in our office (far from it!), but I had at least hoped I'd be given the opportunity to prepare myself for this gross infringement of my human rights. I mean, how else am I supposed to check on my watched blogs, update my own blog (and this one!) and generally participate in the fandom / twitterverse if I Can't. Bloody. Get. Online???

To cut a long, frustrated story short, my surfing habits at work have now been drastically curtailed. I quickly check my emails, log on to Seesmic [hehehe, they haven't yet realised that I can still access Twitter via a web client :-) ] and that's about the size of it. All blogs are blocked (b*st*rds!) and I can't even contemplate accessing Tumblr, given some of the accounts I follow.... All of my movements are logged. Frankly, it sucks, big time.

God. There are times I wish I was a cat. Even a LolCat.

Thank you so much for listening. Please don't hold it against me if I don't reply to your comment immediately. It'll only be because I don't have the freedom to do so...

This post was brought to you from the UK by CC x