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I am constantly astounded by the amount of bureaucratic bullshit I get to deal with in Japan.  This time, it's at work, specifically the elementary school. 

For obvious reasons, all the computers in the computer lab are connected through a popular filtering software.  In my junior high, they have some restrictions in the computer labs and any computer a student could have access to, but computers connected in the teachers' room have completely unfettered access.  This is as it should be.

For some reason, the idiot running the network at my elementary school has set up things so nobody can get anything done.  The computer lab is set up to use some pretty restrictive blocking, and students can only use them when a teacher is in the room; this is sensible.  Most teachers have their own computer that they bring to school to work on things... but the bureaucracy has decided that other teachers' computers can't be connected to the municipal network for "security" reasons (all the elementary schools are on one network).  This almost makes sense, except that there are cheap and simple solutions for such problems.  Instead of connecting the two networks with a firewall, they just have thrown up their hands.  On top of this, the one computer in the teachers' room that has access uses the same set of filters as the student machines.  That is to say that it blocks pretty much any sites in English, including most public webmail apps.  ("We block what we can't understand.")  I was trying to access Google Image search today to find some clipart of reindeer and Santa Claus, and every clipart site I tried to go to was blocked, at least when I wasn't getting intermittent "page not found" errors from google.com, the metric of reliability.  There is no technical reason this should be happening; it's a measure of incompetence and asshattery at its worst.  When I mentioned it to the other teachers they just kinda laughed it off, and suggested I say something to the principal.  We all know that would get nothing accomplished.

It would take a competent administrator about a day to fix the whole thing, and if I had a free day with no classes and free access to the wiring closet I'd do it myself.  I think I'm gonna come in on a Saturday and wire in one of those router/bridges flashed to use Linux.  I'll tell them I thought one of the cables was loose.  As incompetent as the admins are, it will probably take them 5 years to figure out what's going on, and it will be when they come in and see all the teachers actually using the Internet at their desks and being productive.  And by then I'll be long gone.