Genius meets Imbecile

Had a post, in accordance with Sarah's demands for an update. And then I clicked post, forgetting that I was at work and that it had taken me more than 10 minutes to type it all in. It was brilliant. There was humour, wit, pathos. It was the Pulitzer Prize winner of blog posts. I was guaranteed fame, fortune and good grammar, all off the back of this one post. I was, for one shining moment, the most brilliant person to frame a sentence since Oscar Wilde declared "Either that wallpaper goes or I do." Of course, the next moment, I was faced with a screen telling me that Websense was filtering personal sites and could not fulfill my request unless I clicked for an additional 10 minutes of my 120 minute allowance of quota time. I clicked...but too late. My genius will just have to be taken for granted now, without the proof that was in that post. You'll all just have to take my word for it. And I would never stoop to low as to talk myself up. Even in blog form.

Even the brightest among us must have a flaw, it appears. It's not the first time I've had this problem with the web filters here at work. I'm sure it won't be the last. But I have to wonder at the stupidity of it. They're quite happy to allow me access to all number of websites in 10 minute chunks, during my lunch hour. 2 minutes after the clock ticks over, and I'm barred from the lot. But why chose the 10 minute barrier? It seems fairly arbitrary. And it's fine if you're just checking the status of your friends on Facebook, but for writing a literary masterpiece, much like the Lost Blog, it's not enough. There seem to be many offices where filtering is a haphazard affair. Here, for instance, I can't get into Hotmail at any time. I can, however, access Gmail and Yahoo mail. Believe me, I've tried all three (yes...I have that many email accounts. More actually, because there are 2 on some of those servers). I sent an email to a friend a few weeks back that had information about breast cancer in it. It was blocked by their mail filter for profanity. As far as I can tell, it was simply because the word breast appeared in it, along with 'sex' (it wasn't even in that sense of the word - it was talking about gender). It was scientific, health related, but she accused me of sending her porn.

So, creators of web filters of the world, see if you can help me, and others with my level of obviously superior intelligence, given that I can spot the flaws in your system even if I can't fix them. Design a web filter that is intuitive. One that can see the intent of the author. Either that, or get rid of all the bloody censorship and trust to the honest sensibility of your staff to not be looking at anything they shouldn't. Personally, I had always assumed an open plan office was a fairly good solution to the problem. You can never be sure who can see what's on your screen at any given time. A tad big brother-ish, but really, no worse than the parental-style screening process that goes on in here. Such a clever idea, but so...stupid. Damn, kind of like me, in the end, isn't it.