No Gmail at Work

My work joined the line of putting web restriction to any web mail and social networking sites on Monday. It was something completely unexpected because I thought that there was this silent trust that as long as you get your work done, something like this just wouldn't happen. I know that by blocking these sites, maybe more work would get done, but there are definitely some down side to this too.

Access to personal e-mails help keeps the number of phone calls down. What if there's some type of an emergency? With e-mails, you can multitask without bothering your co-workers, but when you get a phone call, you definitely would need to step out of the office. What if you're going through some difficult time or your friend is? Little emails here and there during your breaks to and from your friends can help you stay positive. So how does this affect your work? Well, if someone is in a good mood then they're most likely to work more, but if someone is stress or unhappy then they would most likely not get any work done anyways. But then again, it could work the opposite way as well.

I know that I definitely needed access to my personal e-mail on Monday. I had some work done on the weekend and because my work email can't receive any files larger than 10 MB, I used my Gmail instead to send the work to myself. After finding out the hard way that Gmail was blocked on Monday morning when the project is due that afternoon, I had to waste time driving home to get the file. I used yousendit.com to send the file to my work email address and luckily also added a copy to a memory stick. After I got to work, found out that yousendit was also blocked. Isn't that ridiculous?

Anyways, I completely understand why companies choose to do this, but it just sucks to know that if I really needed to check my email then I can't anymore. So for some of you who understand what this feels like, you might want to read this: Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You

Updates: It turned out that whatever the IT guy have been doing at work, something went wrong and that's how all these web restrictions started. He had no idea, but everything is fixed now so we're back to normal. Yeah!