Wagging their fingers

At my work recently we’ve gotten a couple of emails cracking down on everyone in general about a couple of things. The first one really sucked because I thought it meant that I wouldn’t be able to listen to music any more at work, at least not via the computer. Our internet had been having problems for months where a few times a day it would have these hiccups and be a real pain in the ass. It wasn’t that a page would load slowly, it’s that it would never load, even if you left it forever, and it wouldn’t eventually give up and give an error either. The only solution was to hit stop, and reload or reclick the link after a few minutes once the hiccup was over. It meant though that if you were doing something entirely on the internet, like I often was, you had nothing to do but stare out the window until it was over because nothing would work. So we finally get an email about it from IT, who decide that the main cause of the problem is all of the people who are streaming audio over the internet. I immediately had my doubts and sent O the email we got. He told me that if a small amount of people were taking up 1/4 of our internet traffic (as the IT email claimed) with their streaming audio, then our large office building was woefully underequipped because streaming audio shouldn’t be such a problem. So with that, and the thought that if the problems always happened at the same times each day how could someone listening to the radio on the internet all day be the cause, I continued to listen to music streamed from O’s server-in-a-drawer. And it worked great! No more internet problems, and no more occurrences of the CD I was listening to stopping a bunch of times partway through. So maybe the streaming audio was a problem. But will I be caught for carrying on with it? O doesn’t think so since I’m not getting my stream from an obvious source like Skyradio or something, and he said it’s likely my traffic would just look like I’m download a file for a long while. Plus I don’t have it on all day, or even everyday, so I think they won’t notice an hour here and there. What is has meant is that my two middle-aged co-workers who I share a room with are no longer subjecting me to the crappy pop radio stations that they used to listen to without headphones. Talk about air pollution…

We received the second email yesterday regarding our cafeteria and the fact that we ring up things ourselves in a lame chipknip-based system that is meant to be faster, but really just saves them from having to employ people to run the registers. They’ve done some number crunching and finally figured out that not everyone is being honest in what they pay for, and some people seem to not even pay for their lunch at all. So now everyone must take with them the receipt that comes out after you pay (I never take it because I didn’t ask for it and didn’t need it). The purpose for this being that one of the employees can then stop you and see if you paid for everything you took. Oy. Last week, before this announcement, I already got stopped by some overzealous cafeteria worker who ran after me with the receipt I didn’t take, telling me “You have to take your receipt! We need to see what you paid for!” The thing is, overall I am honest and would never steal a bunch of food, but I do admit that I do not pay for the little packets of condiments they insist on charging us 9 cents for, which I think is a ridiculous setup, they could save money anyway by using the large bottles and allowing us to take as much as we need. I don’t use sauces often anyway, so I suppose I could pay the 9 cents when I do take some. In the meantime, we’ll be occasionally randomly checked, which should be fun. Though so far they’ve only been making sure we take our stupid receipts and not actually looking to see if it matches what we bought.