This page is definitely not approved by Polderland Language &
Speech Technology BV, but it is valid HTML.
(approximation of original version)
Recently somebody at my work was looking at how well findable we were on the WWW. Apparently, not very well. They looked into Google queries, since they are often given as the Referer, and happened upon a query that had found one of my personal pages. The query was for lesbische and swingfeesten (lesbian and dance parties). Hilarity ensued. Especially since those two words don't even occur close to each other on the page.
However, when the boss heard about this, during the general meeting on monday 8 march (2004), he suddenly decided that personal home pages would not be allowed. As if he wasn't aware of them. The decision was made in about 30 seconds, and no discussion was possible. The particular page had been there, unmodified, since 18 june 1998. It wasn't really advertised, since it was made for a meeting back in 1998 (that is now 6 years ago). And there is not a single link that goes from company to personal pages. You have to know they are there, by finding a link from somewhere else.
The reason given was that a personal page would be confused with an official company pages. This is however patently ridiculous. Firstly, everybody can see from the URL, which clearly contains the tell-tale ~personalname, that it concerns somebodies personal pages and not company pages. Secondly, the layout and type of content of my pages is completely different from company pages. Nobody in their right mind would confuse them.
This is of course only begining to scratch the surface of stupidity. Why would an employer care about personal webpages? Can't we, as employees, not make a judgement by ourselves what's in good taste to publish on the WWW? No, apparently he as to take the patronising strategy.
It seems he is afraid that mentioning lesbische swingfeesten (even if not mentioned like that at all on the page) reflect [sic] badly on his reputation. Of course, since there is nothing wrong with lesbian dance parties, or lesbians on one side and dance parties on another, his discriminatory opinion on the parties is more damaging to his reputation than the fact that somebody mentions them.
What makes it even stranger, is that I would never have expected this from this man. In the past, he used to be very much against censorship as practiced by for instance $cientology. I even had some pages about that. Banned now too, obviously.
In summary, I think this is
Some handy links (not very shocking, I would say, but hey, who am I (and mostly rather out of date too)):
This page is definitely not approved by Polderland Language &
Speech Technology BV, but it is valid HTML.