Does it make sense?!

I have been pondering over this for over a month now, since I joined this new organization. Like a lot of other organizations that I know of, even the company that I work for, restricts the use of internet at office. This means, we employees get to access only the "useful" websites such as google search, wikipedia and a few other news related sites. Even webmails like gmail, yahoo etc are restricted... need I say anything about orkut and instant messengers??!! Thats a definite NO NO! I cant even get to watch the stock market coz the site is blocked, theres no way I can do any tradings, I cant get to book movie tickets online, pay my bills or view a lot of photopages like flickr....and the list goes on. Downloads are restricted too... even attachments from emails are filtered to a great extent.......... If you need access to some websites for project reasons, you need PM's approval and you get access only for that duration of the project..... (???!!!!)

The first couple of days this really shocked me. I felt like I was pushed into a place where I lost contact with the world... I might be exaggerating here, but for a person like me, coming from Intel (where there was absolutely no restriction on surfing the net except for a few sites blocked due to security reasons and code of conduct), this was a big deal. When I enquired around, my colleagues said that surfing is restricted mainly to increase employee productivity.... coz this ensures that people dont spend most of their time chatting or surfing non-work-related-info!! .... Whaaaaat!!!!!!! that was my immediate reaction..... Does this mean people are not productive at Intel?!!

I wonder... Does this really work? Does it make ANY sense? I dont think so. I understand the blocking of sites which stream music, coz that can possibly eat on the bandwidth and reduce the speed.... but blocking every other site????? I dont get it! Anyways, rules are meant to be broken....I see every other person (including me) trying to figure out some proxy in order to get those websites working and login to gtalk/yahoo etc... and each time we figure out something, in a couple of weeks that will be blocked too.. so the search continues!! Well.... according to me, this is eating away more precious work-time of ours. If I had access to everything, I think I would have been more productive and not have wasted my time in all this nonsense!!!!!! People spend at least 8-10hrs a day at office and it's ridiculous to expect that everyone devotes all of this time only to work and nothing else... we need breaks.. we need some fun... some distractions... so that we can keep coming back to handle the stressful work! Most of us at office feel the same, but I just dont see a solution to it........ Why don't companies understand this... I really wonder.....