Sometime last week, we realised that no one could access Bebo. Soon enough I discovered Myspace was also blocked. Then Facebook. Naturally this sent a widespread panic throughout the office. How dare they increase our productivity? How will we look at photos of ourselves from the weekend? Since I’m the only one at work with a Myspace page I was the only one freaking out about that. How will I stalk guys cooler/hotter/more interesting than me? How would I stalk ANYONE?

In about 10minutes of the ban being discovered I’d (with a bit of help) figured out away around it.

So if anyone is wanting to unblock a site at work, or school, this is how you do it.
Go to www.unblockall.net . Its a web proxy. Enter the web address. Done. Easy. I take no responsibility for you getting fired.

This worked well, until today. One of the techs (who also happens to be a member of the Board, someone quite important) came into my office. “Hello Miss Get-Around-My-Web-Filters-To-Look-At-Sites”. “Hello” I squeaked. He kinda smirked at me then said very kindly “not to put him in a bad position”. “Ok” I said.
“Have you told anyone else how to do this?
“umm well maybe one person” LIES I told about 6 people and txted others who were not present in the office at the time.

Soon after the entire company received this email:

>Hi Team,
It has been brought to our attention that a number of staff have personal web-sites active throughout the day. These sites are considered distractions and are no different to receiving personal calls or texting during work time. Given this, we have blocked the following sites during working hours:

Bebo Google Mail
Yahoo Mail MySpace
Paradise Mail Facebook
Friendster Hotmail
Photo sharing Flickr
Photobucket Youtube

Access will be available after 5pm each night. It is our intention to allow access to these sites at lunchtime by setting up a separate PC in the cafeteria. Please adhere to the above policy decision ? thanks. >

It was sent from the Managing Director. My boss. Also… my Dad. There are pros and cons to being the boss’s daughter. The cons being I miss out on the office gossip sometimes, people stop talking when I enter a room. Also the added joy of Setting A Good Example. The pros are quite naturally “Dad can I have $5 for lunch” and Not Getting Fired for sneaking past company policy to check my Myspace.

I was having dinner with Mum when Dad stormed in. “LILLEY! The tech just came in and told me that within 10minutes of that ban being put up you had found a way around it! And that you told OTHERS how to do it!”
“Oh did ya really?” Mum was impressed.
“You might as well just drawn a line in the sand and told me not to cross it” I told him.
“Do you know what this means?” Dad was smirking now. “It means that when that bloody ban was put on I was probably the only one in the company who was actually blocked!”
I had to laugh at that. “I notice that you didn’t ban Trademe Dad” (Trademe is the NZ EBay for you Internationalites).
“Trademe doesn’t count”.

Dad has a Trademe addiction. He sold our driveway on it once but thats another story.

By sheer luck I’ve now been granted amnesty from the ban. Not Dads idea, but the Techs. Apprently since I work for 2 websites, therefore being on the net all day, I need to have access to everything. So I guessed it kinda worked out… for me (sorry team!!)

Stay tuned for: The Goings on of Friday Night, in which I get hit on by a girl and a guy at the same time.