Explanations, frustrations, and the need to vent it all away.

I haven’t touched this old blog in quite some time, but I haven’t gotten a chance to. To make it quick and without naming names, when I was away in Winnipeg for that week-long training, one of my managers stirred up some shit with a manager of a different group (all within the IT department), which came down on a fellow colleague of mine, who stirred up some shit to save his own hide. In short, I got blamed for not doing my job and surfing the web all day. I’ll be honest – there have been days where I didn’t have much work to do, and instead of looking for more work to do, I’d just sit in my office and pretty much surf all day. However, ever since Wil got the new job and left me to do the job solo, I hadn’t had a moment’s peace to even think about surfing, let alone looking for extra work to do. Let’s be frank, though – my prosecutor doesn’t exactly go looking for work when he has nothing to do either. In fact, I don’t think anybody in Inco does it – heck, even my Dad, the official mascot for hard work, doesn’t go looking for additional work! So, in the end, this rumor went all over the department and things were arranged to have my access taken away. Now, they can’t just take away my access because I obviously need it for my job. So, they replaced the unmonitored wireless router with just a wired router. A trustworthy informant told me of these dealings, and even warned me not to run a cable all the way to my desk, no matter what – because these people even made a bet that I would have done so by lunch time. Well, excuse me. The router allows me to jump past the corporate proxy server and access protocols such as FTP and VPN. An engineer came into my office to have some documents transmitted by FTP to an external contracting company – and I had to turn him away.

In the end, I knew the situation would come back to bite these idiots in the ass for this bad decision. Some accounting auditors from another company arrived to continue some work they had done in a previous visit – but they couldn’t access the wireless router anymore! I immediately told them to speak to whoever had highest seniority in the IT department – and it certainly wasn’t me. In due time, the wireless router was reinstated, but the guy who used me as a scapegoat wasn’t even here! However, he’s back tomorrow, and I can’t wait to confront him about the situation. I couldn’t do so before without compromising my insider and getting him into trouble, but it can still happen, so I’ll play it dumb and pretend like I found out about it when the auditors arrived. Oh, this is going to be interesting.

I’ll admit that I do surf at work – but only when there really is nothing else to do. Between two jobs, I never have a chance to surf at home except for the mission critical stuff, and even then, I keep it as brief as possible. I had some overtime to do today, and while I had access to surf, I didn’t really bother because I would’ve gotten too absorbed into it and I know how I can get with it.

So, here are some interesting questions, if anybody is reading this. Who actually has unmonitored access to the internet at work? Who takes shameful advantage of it? Who has gotten into trouble with it?

I shouldn’t have to justify my actions. I’m a server admin. My job requires surfing ability, and when I surf, I exercise my ability to seek out a specific piece of information. There have been many instances where I came across some issues with a particular piece of hardware or software. Surfing sometimes gets me the solution faster than a phone call to my guys in Toronto – and that’s if the person I’m looking for is on duty (everybody rotates on shift work over there). If some people are miffed because they see me surfing, then that’s tough cookies. These jerks get top pay, top benefits, and top perks. I’m contracted, which means I get bollocks for pay, squat for benefits, and shit for perks. These people are just damn jealous that I have the access and the means. Do I take shameful advantage of it? Only if I have the time. Do these bastards wave their pay, benefits, and perks in my face on a daily basis? Damn rights, but do I go around flaunting the fact that I can access Facebook and they can’t? Of course not. I’m not an Inco asshole. Besides, I’d love to see any of those jerks sit in my chair, do my job, and still dare to say that I shouldn’t have unmonitored surfing access. If that were the case, then when a server goes down and the fix is detailed in a private forum on the web, I am hooped. If you really want that kind of access, go ahead and try to do my job. You’ll find that those surfing days are few and far between.

Holy shit, it’s two hours past my bedtime, and I am going to be fucked tomorrow at the office. THIS is why I haven’t been able to blog recently – because I value my sleep over it, and I have other hobbies that I need time for as well.