In an effort to boost workplace productivity, Cincinnati City Hall has banned most employee communications, including Internet use, phone use, mail, email, and physical conversation.

Communications Center director Tim McCready explained. "The goal here is productivity. I mean, I personally witnessed that new guy in filing making dinner plans with his wife over the phone!  It must have lasted at least two minutes.  No one in this building from the Mayor to staff members on down to interns should be allowed to waste taxpayer money on non-related work things like talking to your wife." Here, Tim made air quotes with his fingers for some reason.

Phone conversations, emails, and Internet web sites will all be filtered automatically by Ban It!, a classification and filtering system bought by the city for $85,000,000.

But this new policy begs the question, what about legitimate uses for communicating?

"Legitimate?" Tim replied. "Like a council member calling a constituent? BWAHAHAHAHA! But seriously though, I'm aware that there are legitimate uses for this technology. That's why any employee who needs to make a phone call or look up a website only needs to ask me. For example, the Police Department needed access to WEBN for their event planning. And Mr. Pepper asked me the other day to give him access to HookersOnMain.com for some kind of urban planning project, and I gave it to him immediately."

Since it's unlikely that anyone at City Hall will read this story because blogs have been banned, The Dealer would just like to say that a gaggle of monkeys could do a better job than Council. Monkeys. Except for Tarbell. He's cool.