The Fall Of The USBastille

I'm going to make this post's point very simple: I want my USB ports back, you sanctimonious son of a bitch.

I can (and have) put up with a lot of junk, a lot of shit, and a lot of stupidity in the name of a steady flow of cash. My patience is surprisingly long in this regard, and I have been quite patient so far. After all, there are few things in this world that I value more than a steady income, so in the name of that, I am willing to deal with a lot.

I put up with the arbitrary reasons given for virtually any policy that gets set or changes in the workload that occur. It isn't so much that I mind the changes or the policies, really. I found the bullshit reasons that came attached to them to be annoying, and occasionally insulting to my intelligence.

I will put up with ridiculous policies on sleeping or having any sort of enjoyment in the office. Let's face it, those policies are stupid and nobody is really going to follow through on them if the one who made them up isn't around. We will pay lip service to your insipid attempts at establishing control but don't expect us to buy into it because you say so.

I will put up with them putting privacy-invading software that allows them to see the things I do on my work PC. I understand the rationale behind putting it there. That doesn't mean I don't take offense to the fact that it is invasive of my privacy and quite insulting.

I will even put up with the fact that I believe every last employee of this company to be grossly, grossly underpaid. I mean, for all the work we do, we could be making a lot more than we currently are. I suspect the only real reason we stick around here is that, on some level, we enjoy each other's company. And the free Internet.

I will even put up with the incessant whining I hear from practically everyone else each time a site like Friendster or Multiply gets blocked. I never liked social networking anyway; think its stupid, really. The constant whining when something of that sort gets blocked is just so incredibly repetitive and annoying.

I even manage to put up with the fact that the Internet connection the office runs on is god-awful, to the point that a week doesn't go by without it breaking down completely. Let's face it, folks: it happens a lot. And there's likely quite a grain of truth to the joke that this is because the boss is too cheap to pay for a better connection.

I also put up with the noise. Gods help me, the noise of the night shift people as they're about to leave is grating. Not a day of this passes by without me forcing down the urge to grab a throat and throttle it until I hear that satisfactory sound of a death rattle. These people seem to never shut up, but no matter how tempting it is to silence them myself, I keep calm and not make a move.

But blocking USB ports? That I'm taking very personally.

See, I'm lazy. I like to spend half my time in the office sitting in front of the computer and doing things with no relation at all to work. Browsing Deviantart or Photobucket for pics to add to my expanding collection, for example. Sometimes I just type in some random topic I'm interested in and let Google take over from there. Other times, I just want to sit back, go into a forum and browse. But mostly, I like searching for pictures.

Pretty pictures of scenes, characters, backgrounds, and whatnot. I like taking them home. I like the thrill of seeking a specific picture, spending an hour or so finding it, and plugging in a USB drive so I can take it home and add it to my compilation of similar pictures. This is pretty much the only thing I bother coming to work for anymore, and my actually getting my work done ahead of time is a side-effect of it. Without that...well, work becomes rather pointless until I remind myself of the meager cash flow it earns me, doesn't it? Financial motivators only work for so long without something to support them.

I'm a digital packrat. I like to make redundant copies of my files. I like having at least two copies of any given file on two separate computers, making sure that in the event one fails, I can effectively restore things without too much trouble. In theory, there are a few back-ups in place for work.

This is fine and dandy if either one was actually capable of exhibiting some degree of consistent reliability. One back-up archive is useless since it is accessible only via the Internet and only within the office itself. I don't think you can even retrieve files from this archive. The other is crash-happy, especially whenever the electricity fluctuates or dies out. Plus, there doesn't appear to be any real way to get files stored there back - not without it being altered somehow, if things I've overheard from the voice loggers are any indication.

This leaves me with the option of simply dumping files into my USB drive and taking them home as back-up. Now this is no longer an option. Frankly, I'm not about to rely on two unreliable back-up archives when a better option is staring me in the face but can't be used because of some bullshit arbitrary decision.

I've taken a lot of crap over my time in this job. I've more or less put up with it. I've not once deliberately attempted to be insulting or confrontational of the boss' policies in any degree, no matter how much I disagreed with what's been laid down. But this?

Viva La Revolución.