The man is keeping me down again

I'm being oppressed at work again.

Not even one tenth as bad as my previous job, but still, I naturally rebel at idiotic and pointless attempts to control employees.

In my previous job, the people running the place were unfathomably clueless and corrupt morons. You couldn't kick over a stack of papers rotting in a cubicle without finding some example of corporate malfeasance, cronyism, and blatant multi-million dollar conflicts of interest.

And that company was actually one of the less corrupt ones I know of. Our direct competitors were ten times worse. The turn over rate and company hopping in the insurance industry resembles the stereotype of an inbred southern town where everyone marries their first cousin, so it's easy to get a lot of dirt on the corporate culture of the competitors.

The experience jaded me quite heavily towards corporations and corporate structures in general. There's nothing in this world that's so shitty it can't be made worse by organizing a committee of MBAs to try and fix it.

So I was delighted to wind up working for a small, non-public company not long after being laid off from the old shithole. I actually still like it here quite a bit.

But some rules are stupid.

For example, our new No Personal Laptop rule. It's not even a rule, per se, but more of a directive from the executives and upper management that they don't want personal computers on the property. It's a security risk, they say.

Which is ironic, because I use my personal lap top to log in to work every afternoon.

For those who don't know, I use my tablet PC to make pretty much all of my art. So during the day, when things are slow, I would often whip up a quick sketch to keep my easily bored and understimulated brain from getting me into trouble (see my previous entry about stupid decisions).

This kind of puts a cramp on my style. It's not a really big deal, which is why I categorize this under the "whining" category. It just means I have to go back to a good old fashioned sketchbook and scan stuff in later.

I realized how deep I am into the digital art thing when I reflexively tried to hit the 'undo' hotkey on my mechanical pencil. Oops.

The other irritant is that it cuts my web browsing down a lot. I jailbroke my iPhone and turned it into a modem, so I used my laptop for all web browsing, avoiding any use of corporate resources for cruising the interwebs.

Logically speaking, telling me I can't use my laptop at work is actually a bigger security risk than letting me have it, but I don't think that my explaining this in short sentences to the policy makers here will really fly, or be good for my continuous long term employment efforts.

Well, at least they let me use my phone. Which is practically a computer in its own right, and capable of just as much mischeif in the wrong hands as a laptop...

Ok, I'm going to stop complaining before I irritate myself into trouble.