Slackers

Our corporate IT department here at Really Big Corporation is a bewildering combination of jackbooted crusaders and bumbling incompetents. They regularly send out emails telling everyone that the email server is having problems and that you should contact them if you don't get the email. They also roll out corp-wide applications which clearly aren't ready for prime time, replacing perfectly functional systems for no apparent reason, all the while quipping in Democrat-like fashion that they can't fix the bugs until it's in the hands of the users. Nothing important or critical, mind you; just the customer accounts, payroll, and project reporting software. The fallout from that fiasco is still hitting the ground a month later.

Today this group of technological nincompoops engaged in what I can only assume is a belated effort to make themselves appear competent in the eyes of their increasingly suspicious superiors: they have blocked Pandora radio at the corporate DNS servers. This action simultaneously irritates and amuses me.

It's an irritant as I like to keep soft classical music playing in the background in my office. As the sales manager, I find it helps in dealing with irate customers, (and employees, as far as that goes). It also keeps me from turning beet-red and exercising the option for my Ex-Marine Killing Spree, but that's a secondary benefit. Since I'm in the middle of a big metal and concrete building, traditional radio isn't really an option, so it's the intarwebz or Deathly Silence. As for bandwidth, we have six T-1 lines coming into the local office for use by 29 employees; I'm pretty sure we can spare a few Kb/sec for music. As I mentioned, however, it's only an irritant. You see, the Monkeys of Information didn't block Slacker Radio -- or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of other online music distribution systems.

This sort of thing would be more amusing to me if it weren't so easy to outwit them. It's like faking out a retarded dog.

Fetch, boy!