Dream Journal 2017-11-11: My Coworker Has Terrible Ideas
Picture a stereotypical corporate office. I’m sitting at a desk doing honest-to-God work like some sort of productive employee. One of my coworkers is sitting at a desk on the other side of the room playing around on his phone as is usual. He seems to be playing some sort of game before suddenly spinning back to his computer and dashing off an email.
A few seconds later, my email inbox pings with a message from my coworker. The subject line is “Website Unblock Request.” This is one of the numerous job duties I must perform in my capacity as an employee. Sometimes an official or important website gets blocked by the content filter and the other employees submit requests to get that block bypassed. I would like to say that people understand what constitutes an important work-related site, but sadly, this is not the case. Most people just abuse this functionality in hopes of getting some random stupid website unblocked so they can see what was in the newest forwarded email from Great Aunt Edna.
I open up the message.
“A user has requested the following website be unblocked: (some random website URL)
Reason for unblock request: Work-Related Website”
Surely this is a totally legitimate website, right? So I click the link as I have done countless times before and prepare myself to face another case of disappointment caused by user-induced idiocy. As expected, this is a link to some fly-by-night Flash game website. The link was to an old-school Zelda knockoff that was probably already infringing on copyright.
The coworker swivels in in his chair to face me. “I think we need to get that put on the front page of our intranet website” he says. Unfortunately for everyone, he’s being serious about this request.
I don’t have time to entertain this foolishness. “Why would you think that such a stupid request was a good idea in the first place?” Those were not the words I used, but they are polite approximations of what was actually said.
“Because it has numbers and stuff in it,” he says, apparently oblivious to the vortex of stupidity that is swirling about him.
“The only numbers in this game are for the amount of rupees you have, and there is nothing here that would warrant unblocking this game.” Corporate drone Fish Davidson lays down the harshness. “REQUEST DENIED!”
And then I click the little link in the email to officially acknowledge that the request was denied, which sends an email to my coworker with the reason for the denial. My email was a single line long:
“Denied because it was a stupid request.”
Damn, Fish Davidson! You harsh!
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Header image taken from the Comedy Central Show, Workaholics.