After a bit of work with the tech support guys, the world (at least, the company) is safe from improper web browsing. Turned out to be an authentication problem with the database. Even though the database was properly created, it didn’t have the right permissions for the user account that could read the database for the filtering sessions.

That only took two hours, with a bit less than an hour on hold. (Don’t you hate those “we’re really busy but keep hanging on” messages that repeat every two minutes, along with the generic music that also repeats every 90 seconds….)

An interesting sidelight of the web filtering software is the ability to determine how much time employees spend on the Innertubes. I can run a report of the top 500 users by their Innertubes time, assigning an hourly value of $30, and determine how much that web surfing is costing the company. Turned out to be a very large value.

Right now, we’re in a budget crunch. I figure that we could save a bunch of labor dollars by looking at employee’s browsing times. Say the employee is on the ‘net 2 hours a day. So the assumption is that the employee really does 6 hours of work each day. So that’s what they get paid for. A 20% reduction in labor costs would go a long way towards helping the budget crunch.

Of course, if they had supervisors who could manage their employees time and work output…

(He says while he posts this entry during working hours…)