Work is Fun!

So my "real" job just implemented more changes to our internet policy here, in an effort to keep employees from having a good experience. They have banned 80 categories of websites, from "traditional religions" to "sports". I spent all of yesterday figuring out which sites I could visit and which sites I couldn't, an activity I would have been saved from if they would have just kept our internet the way it was. It's like they want me to waste time here. Some interesting sites I'm banned from, followed by the category it fits into:

getreligion.org (a weblog about the mass media's coverage of religion) -- "traditional religions".
answers.org (Christian apologetics website) -- "traditional religions"
espn.go.com (ESPN) -- "sports"
theticket.com (sports radio station I listen to in Dallas) -- "sports"
mp3.com (artist promotion service) -- "mp3 audio and download service"
davidlynch.com (director David Lynch's website) -- "cultural institutions"

Some sites not banned, but are giant timewastes and potentially offensive:
The Onion, IFilm, Atom Films, every online newspaper, papajohns.com, and as you can see, blogger and blogspot. That means I can read every blog, and post things myself. So, this actually doesn't affect me very much, but I'm still annoyed by it. It's so silly.

Did anyone else see that news report that people waste something like an average of 2 hours on the job every day just doing random non-work-related things? Did anyone else notice that employers expect you to blow only one hour a day, and so they're unhappy with all this double downtime? I predict there will be a crackdown on excessive time wasting, starting with my employer yesterday and this whole internet "categories of judgment" thing. Big business will not have its employees enjoying themselves! This is unacceptable!

The ugly truth about all those office layoffs we've famously had(I'm talking about when staff has just been reduced -- not about when jobs have been shipped off to another country and lost forever) is that employers can tell people to do all sorts of extra jobs they never had before, but a worker is always going to do the same amount of work. If a worker has jobs A-D, and you give him job E because you just fired that lazy Mandi who liked Marylin Manson a little too much, he may do job E, but something in A-D will suffer for it. Something will fall by the wayside. All across America, in this new "hyper-productive" economy built upon a lack of a labor force, crap just isn't getting done that needs to be done. And people are hiding this fact, too, so that by the time we discover it, it'll be too late. And somebody will eventually have to clean things up. We are making our bed, and we will soon lie in it.