Work Daze

Do people think you are as dull and boring as your job? Are you searching for a way to express your true nature as fearless and desirable superhero? How about trying on this identity – corporate rogue.

That’s you, reader. No more Mr. Follow-The-Rules. No more Ms. I’ll-Do-It-Your-Way. Instead, you’ll be one of those office outlaws “The Wall Street Journal” characterizes as Enemy #1 to IT departments “who make the rules and track down the rogue employees who break them.”

Or so I have learned in a recent Journal article irresistibly titled “Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You.” I initially thought this piece of investigative journalism would reveal such not-very-shocking facts, such as #1, IT people don’t really care if you’re happy, or #2, IT people think anyone who doesn’t know how to write code in C++ is a life form lower than the sea monkey.

But no – the Journal’s reporter, Ms. Vauhini Vara, has actually scrounged up some extremely useful info on what IT doesn’t want you to do and how to do it, anyway.

Before you loose the basic animal desire to surf the web for the latest news on Lindsay Lohan, or send personal fan mail to a flounder from the company’s Blackberry, here are a few of IT’s Top Ten Rules and how a corporate rogue like you can break them.

1. How to send giant files.

I don’t know about you, but I never wanted to send giant files until I learned it wasn’t allowed by the IT Ayatollahs who “want to avoid filling up their servers, and thus slow them down.” Of course, the real reason the IT nerds want to preserve server space is so they can occupy those extra electrons with their own collections of downloaded, overheated Japanese anime, not to mention the naughty snaps of nerdy hi-jinks from the latest Star Trek convention.

The solution is to use an online filing sharing service, like YouSendIt or SendThisFile, which allow you to post elephant-sized files on the Internet for peanuts. This is a great solution, unless you have nothing to send, in which case you can surf over to parezhilton.com and download a complete transcript of Paris Hilton’s prison poetry. Now that’s how a corporate rogue wins first place in the “my file is bigger than your file” competition.

2. How to use software that your company won’t let you download.

As a good corporate citizen, you know better than to tell your IT professional that you’re less than 100% satisfied using a version of Word Perfect which hasn’t been upgraded since the Nixon administration. But somewhere, deep, deep inside your rogue nature, you suspect that there may be newer and better software programs available.

A corporate wimp would wait patiently, but a rogue uses web-based alternatives. If downloading Instant Messenger is a no-no, rogues can go-go to Google Talk, and IM to your heart’s content, free from the bounds of authoritarian IT types.

If you’re really feeling evil and vengeful, you can even use a rogue web site to IM to IT, challenging the totalitarian trolls to track you down in the digital domain where rogues like you run free. Just don’t be surprised if you come in one morning and find your telephone replaced by an orange-juice can and a string. Those IT types are weird, but they do carry a grudge.

3. How to visit the web sites your company blocks.

Yes, we’re talking about those web sites men like, like ILoveMacrame.com and GreatGazpachoRecipes.net. Just put the tail of your mouse on one of these forbidden sites and you could find yourself in an IT inferno for life. According to Ms. Vara, office rogues suggest using a “third-party site, called a proxy” which allows you to see a web site without actually visiting it.

Another way rogues circumvent the corporate rules is to use the free Google foreign language translation service, asking it to perform an “English-to-English” translation of a taboo web site. In the course of translating NaughtyBitswithMyLittlePony.com from English to English, the translation site will act like a virtual proxy, making available to you 24/7 all the seamy wonders in dark netherworld of My Little Pony.

We’ve run of space for rules and rule-breakers, but it does occur to me that there could be another useful application for Google’s translation service. Why not run the scolding messages from your IT department through a Nerd-to-English translation. That way corporate rogues would know exactly which rules they want to break.