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www.thephatphree.com/features.asp?StoryID=3995&SectionID=11
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Firewalls Lead to Decreased Productivity: An Inter-Office Memo Dear The Man, On behalf of your entire staff, regarding the increased internet security in the form of firewalls and restricted internet access, I would like to extend to you an invitation to suck my balls. Now that I have that out of the way, I would like to explain why the increased security has become detrimental to office morale, but how it has also led to decreased efficiency. The first thing that your coolies in IT took away from us is our steady stock of internet pornography. Exactly how I'm supposed to do my job when I don't have a pornography reserve at the ready at all times I will never know. It seems like a good idea: take away their porn, and then they will do more work. But in reality, it is part of a Ugandan-poor business model. Let's say it's a day that starts with M...or T or W or F or a TH sound (and sometimes S if you make me come in on the weekend, asshole.): I am in the doldrums of typical post-lunch afternoon blues; trying to trace back to the exact moment in my life where it all went wrong. Simultaneously, I am calculating the over/under on the number of times I could bash Andrew from accounting in the face with the printer before he collapses, gurgling on his own bitter spinal fluid. My heart hopes for twenty-two, but my brain says eight is more realistic. I really just need to relax. Everyone knows that the only sure-fire cure for these fits of depressive volatility is a bout of right metacarpal sexual release. But you and your cronies have disallowed all of the good sites, preventing me from warming up in any civilized manner. So instead, I have two options: 1) Attempt to become aroused by the stat lines on my fantasy football roster. ('Tis possible: Carson Palmer: 595 yards, 8 touchdowns, 2 interceptions in the first two weeks...tell me that doesn't make it move a little, even if you don't have him on your team.) or 2) Abscond with Patricia's Lane Bryant catalog while she in the break room seeing how many chicken wings she can fit into her mouth (she calls it "Chicken Wing Chubby Bunny"), and commit the following acts of non-gentlemanly bathroom un-etiquette: a) Lock myself in the bathroom's one stall and pray that none of my coworkers have to take a crap in the next 75 minutes. (Who invented these one-hole bathrooms? They should be exhumed, dipped in one of those bottomless, never-ending latrines you find at Boy Scout camp and then reburied. Nobody wants to exit a stall and come face-to-face with a man who's about to marinate in your feculant essence.) b) Try to convince myself that the girls that grace LB's pages (peculiar coincidence for an fat girl magazine) aren't that obese. c) Start sweating.
But regardless, instead of taking the three-and-a-half-minutes it required in the pre-firewall epoch, it takes me a full two-hours to complete the necessary transaction. And this is assuming that I even take this less-than-classy path. More likely, I will spend the afternoon loitering around the desk of the slutty girl in accounting, trying to coerce her into giving me a beej in the supply closet. All of this time is now wasted; time that could have been spent at my desk doing work, relaxed and focused after spending a quality 1/30th of an hour with my phalanges. Next, internet gaming vanished. I won't argue that games on the internet are productive in any way, but you must realize that even if you get rid of our access to poker websites and Yahoo! Games, we will find something to play. If this means traveling to Nickelodeon.com or SI for kids, we will do it. I don't have any problem spending six-hours straight playing "SpongeBob's Bubble Bustin' Game". Then finally, the last straw: one morning, to my utter dismay, I innocently opened internet explorer and typed in www.thephatphree.com and this is what I received in return: "Site blocked due to violent content." Violence!? Where is there violence? Show me one example! It's enough to make me try to beat a baby panda to death with a bag of kittens.* You don't understand. Now that we aren't able to waste our days exploring our favorite internet sites, we waste our days trying to figure out ways of bypassing this security so that we can explore our favorite internet sites. Which means, for those among you who suck at math, that I waste twice as much time as I used to. You have turned me into a regular computer nerd. I have done hundreds of hours of research on how to disable the internet restrictions. I have tampered with the proxy settings in the internet options. I have downloaded programs at home and emailed them to myself so that I could have access at work. And I have tried translating websites via proxies. All of these things took away time that I could have used for doing the tasks that you pay me to do. You dusty bastard. So in conclusion: do yourself a favor, and give us back our right to free information. And remember this: no matter what you take away from us--disabling internet websites or restricting downloading, taking away our instant messengers or even limiting bathroom access--we will find a way to not do work. We will find a way to not do work. Sincerely, Matt Shirley * If you didn't catch the irony here, I will explain it to you: See, this piece is to appear on thephatphree.com. And in this piece, I argue that thephatphree.com is not, in fact, violent whatsoever. But then, keeping in mind that this exact piece is going to be on thephatphree.com, I talk about beating a baby panda to death with a bag of kittens, which, is basically the definition of violence. Get it?!? Crafty, I know. # For those of you who still enjoy a bit of internet latitude, I invite you go to amazon.com and purchase my brother's (Paul Shirley) book. It's called "Can I Keep My Jersey" and you can find it here: Can I Keep My Jersey. Yes it is a shameless plug, but it really is quite a delightful read. And if you know me at all (which you don't), you know how hard it is for me to say that. 
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Read this article online at: www.thephatphree.com/features.asp?StoryID=3995&SectionID=11