2006-04-30

feebing around @ 2:13 p.m.

My rational response: Figures that this would happen. They've been curtailing our access more and more over the years and I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner. They started tracking our use about the same time I got promoted, so I didn't really worry much, as I didn't have the time I had to fool around like I did before I became a supervisor/coordinator. And because I r smrt, I quit accessing my blog/journal/dland sites from work as well. I have heard of people fired for less and well, I need my job. As long as I can access the informational sites I'm using to develop the information resources project I've created (unfunded, of coursr), I'm good.

Irrational response: YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO OBSESSIVELY CHECK MY EMAIL DURING BUSINESS HOURS TO SEE IF THE FIRM HAS SENT ME MY ITINERARY? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW IF ANY OF MY OTHER JOB SEARCHES ARE FRUITFUL? YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-ahem-

So yeah. It's all good. This is good, really. It's good training in prep for a possible move to a new job. Just because you can get at the web doesn't mean you should be noodling around when work needs doing. And it's a proven fact that if peeps don't have webstuph time wasters, productivity goes up. I think I've held this sort of work ethic all my adult days, I believe.

I discovered email (eudora! no html! whee!) in grad school (the first time) and jumped on all the queer listservs. Very hard to navigate in those days. Getting a list of commands was easy; translating them was the hard part. First job after that was internal email only (ccMail! whose product was that anyway? ah, lotus. nevermind.), but a couple of us figured out how to hack our way outside the company's intranet, heh. Then I transferred to an outpost where our access was dialup and someone dropped an aohell floppy into my lap. I think it might have been 2.0, I'm not certain. And that's when things got all st00pid. I was using a company laptop at first, then the upgraded me (yes, it was an upgrade at the time) to desktop. I had no 'puter of my own, so I spent a great deal of time involving myself with shit I had no business doing on work time. Too much hot chat, email lists and so on. Hey, I was a n00b queerfemme and finding "community" was teh awesome. Couldn't help myself.

So after a year of dinking about at will, I moved to the ATL and got all shut down again. Eventually hacked my way out of that email intranet system as well, but no web access. I swear, I don't remember how I did any of this, I think it was just a matter of figuring out what the company's domain name was and I was off and running. But that was when I gave up and purchased my very first cyberride, a generic laptop. And I've been hooked in ever since.

I don't know how this turned into a history of my intarweb development, other than the fact that I'm bored out of my skull today and have nothing better to do. Mind you, there are constructive things I could be doing, like washing the dog-snot covered windows, working on the program's website conversion, working out, burning myself a tutorial CD of the jazz standards I'll be performing at an informal gig in NOLA in about a week and half, researching the people I'll be talking to/interviewing with at the end of next month, trying to familiarize myself as best I can with one of the database systems they use and so forth. But instead, here I sit in my fuzzy footie pajamas, trying to hold it together.

I wish I could afford to have a social life.