The Day the [Internet] Died

In the past few weeks, irony has followed me everywhere I go in every instance of my life, like a shadow, a dark and haunting shadow. My life is stuck on repeat and no matter how hard I try, I can't change the track to something more upbeat like Money, Time or hell even a truly appropriate song I heard just now called Better Days by the Goo Goo Dolls, of all bands. It's not that my days aren't better than they have been, because they are. They really are. But I could deal without the extreme irony breathing down my neck.

Yesterday I came into my office and started my computer the same way I have every day since I started at this new job. I logged into my gmail, opened a few more tabs for all the daily blogs I read and of course, opened a tab for facebook. You can imagine my surprise when this mean little window popped open and said it was...BLOCKED. I blinked. And thought, this just can't be. I was on it yesterday. I was on it Tuesday. So then I tried a few of the blogs I read. BLOCKED. I tried my own blogger dashboard. BLOCKED. I went across the hall and asked our web designer just what in the hell was going on and to my dismay he told me that overnight my company had installed a new Internet service provider. Remember, back in the day when we had our competition and I was basically working on dial-up. Yeah well, now we've got this super, lightning- fast, blink and you are there Internet but wait...what's the irony of it all. You can't go anywhere! Almost every website, even ones that are somewhat "related" to my job or at the very least, my field, are blocked. If I want to go check out any upcoming speakers on the AIGA website, I can't. If I need to troubleshoot my mac by using a mac blog, I can't! Unless I get permission from my director first. In reality that seems like a great loop hole, but in all actuality, I can't spend everyday of my life asking my director for permission to access the web. Look it's fine if you want to block facebook or myspace (hell what do I care, I don't even have a myspace account) but when you start blocking things that are, in fact, related to my JOB that's when the world starts turning on a crooked axis. And above all, that's when I stop liking it here and start hating my job and further hating corporate America. If you want to block it fine. But don't give me full access for four months and then take it away. When you take away my Internet, you take away the trust. And we all know what happens when you take away the trust...the shit hits the fan like big time!

My boss put in a request for his entire department to be released from the blocked list. I can now access Internet on my PC (that's right, I'm so cool that this new job gave me 2 computers) but the irony, that's right, more irony of that is that my PC has a hard drive as small as a thumb drive. It's 9.5 GB. I don't think most of you are as nerdy as I, so for the record, that's about as big as a Nano or a whopping one third of most of our video iPods. So any time I open even the lousy Internet, the damn thing can't handle it and crashes. And then it takes me roughly 15 minutes to reboot only to have it freeze again. I haven't decided yet if this cycle is irony or just plain shitty circumstances.

Regardless, until they clear our mac stations my postings will be scattered because I can't choose between my love of sanity or my love for writing in this blog. Either I post on the freeze-n-go PC or I wait till I get home at like 11:30 when the last thing I feel like doing is sitting in front of my computer. It's way more likely at that point that I will snuggle into my bed with my puppy than rant about how my stupid company ruined the Internet!