Recently, I started a new job. The environment that I am is incredibly slow-paced compared to the past places I have worked previously. For example, I will often go to my supervisor and ask for work rather than being brought projects to work on during the course of my work hours. I finish projects in quick order, and put them out for review. Sometimes, that takes several days and has even run into weeks before being looked at by senior staff before being deployed.
So in the meantime to do something somewhat constructive, I began going to technical sites for programming, hardware, etc., to read about latest news, trends, and technology that apply to my job as a software developer.
A few weeks ago, the department supervisor informed me that a report had shown that I was making attempts to go to sites with “adult” content. I assured the boss that I don’t go to adult sites, and that I assume that the firewall/blocker was seeing embedded content that I couldn’t control. Sure enough, video content sharing sites (such as YouTube) have been generically labelled as “adult”.
So, now I can’t go to websites to read about technical information without fear of being labelled as some kind of pervert who is going to adult sites during work hours. And, I understand that this report is going to be seen by top-level management who won’t know that the blocking apparatus here hasn’t been configured properly by the networking staff.
So, what am I to do? I don’t have the means to get a 4G phone and surf from there, we are not allowed to bring in our own laptop with a mobile broadband card, and I do not want to sit here and just stare at walls because I can’t go to TechRepublic or other technically-informative sites because I fear there will be an embedded webpage object that is from a website my organization has erroneously labelled “adult”.
What would you do?