Do you notice anything strange about my Google Chrome front page?

This is what baffled me when I opened it up.  My heart started palpitating, and I started to breath faster.  It better not be what I think it is.  Oh, it was.

MY JOB BLOCKED FRIENDFEED

Some of you might say, “Well, you shouldn’t be on Friendfeed anyway.”  The thing is I am a super fast worker.  I can do something that takes another person eight hours in two hours, so I have six hours where I am not doing anything.  This is where FriendFeed comes in.  It’s my time to catch up with the friends I have made on there; find out what is going on in the world; and have interesting conversations.  What am I going to do now?

This is the message that I got:

Acceptable Use of Company Bandwidth

Employee use of company Internet bandwidth for activities such as downloading TV episodes, videos, and streaming music or news consumes large amounts of valuable bandwidth and thus can have a serious impact on the availability and performance of business-related resources and services. As such, any material use of the company’s Internet bandwidth for these types of non-business related activities falls outside the scope of Acceptable Use. Please do your part to ensure that we are maximizing the benefit derived from [company's] business resources.

Over the past month, we have seen numerous examples of excessive use, including the following: Downloading an episode of a TV series which consumed over 50% of the available bandwidth at one location for over two hours; users watching TV or a “live” news shows (just one user streaming TV or news easily consumes over 50% of the entire bandwidth at one of our standard smaller office Internet connections).

As a reminder, our Acceptable Use (AU) policy (Policy & Guidelines – section 8006) explicitly states that excessive non-work related use of the Internet is a policy violation. The above mentioned (and any similar) examples clearly fall into this category. To reiterate what CEO stated in his earlier message on inappropriate use of[company's]resources, “When in doubt, please exercise good judgment and common sense in the use of [company's]computing resources.”

If you are unsure of an activity, or you feel you have received this message in error, contact the help desk for assistance.

Oh FriendFeed, if it’s true, why are you taking up so much of my company’s bandwith that it made them take notice of you and restrict you?  Don’t you know how torturous it is to now finish up my work and have to twiddle my thumbs waiting for the time that I can leave?  I now have to comment and view you on my Blackberry, which doesn’t give me the convenience of a keyboard.  I have to clumsily type, backspace, and type every comment.

For my company, this is one of the reasons why people start resorting to playing online games and gambling because you begin blocking all the innocent sites.  You don’t block Facebook that I bet more people use, but you block FriendFeed?  I think I am the only person who uses it, and I only come in two-three times a week, so I seriously doubt it’s the bandwith.

As for me, I will have to become “one of those people” who are steadily twiddling with their Blackberry.

Written by: Shevonne on July 14, 2009.
Last revised by: Shevonne on December 28, 2009.

Tags: bandwith, blocking friendfeed, company's bandwith, friendfeed, job blocked friendfeed