The big news story that is making its way through the media now is the story of Abby Sunderland.  She is a 16 year old girl that attempted the world record for being the youngest girl to sail around the world.  She left back in January, and failed to make it around the world.  Her boat hit a storm in the Indian Ocean and was rendered inoperable.  She required immediate rescue.  In an International rescue effort, she was found and is on her way to Madagascar so that the United States can pick her up. 
 
Here is where the story gets interesting.  Australia is going to charge the family at least $300,000 to recover the cost of the rescue.  The family is going crazy saying that they can't afford it, and "What price do you put on a child's life?"  But it doesn't end there.  The family has sold the rights to her story to be turned into a TV series AND a book, and they "can't afford it."  This is ridiculous.  The family should be held responsible for what they allowed their daughter to do.  I mean she is only 16 years old, so she is still technically a child.  Hello.  Child Endangerment comes to mind.  The family needs to be held responsible for their actions based solely on that ground alone.  France (the country that actually found her) has not decided if they are going to charge the family on some level yet. 
 
I have stated where I stand on this case.  What about you the Giant Bomb Community?     
 
Edit: Did I mention that she wants to go out and try it again? 

After a year or so of not touching it at all, I have decided that I am going to get back into Lord of the Rings Online this evening.  I remember it being a blast back in the day, but I just sort of stopped playing for no real reason at all.  The story telling in it is to die for.  I would even go as far as to say that it has the best story telling in any MMO ever made.  I remember playing as an elf back then.  An Elvish Lore-master if I recall correctly.  Lore-masters are an odd mix between a mage and a hunter in typical MMO lingo.  Mage in that they can deal massive amounts of damage, and hunter due to pets. 
 
I am planning on starting over fresh from the very beginning of the epic tale as a wee Hobbit.  A Hobbit Minstrel I think.  Why?  Hobbit's are short, and I am short.  Minstrels are healers, and are amazing at going solo because they have some awesome attack abilities.  The only thing that I would need to know is if any Giant Bombers are still playing LOTRO and what servers they are on so that I can pick where I would like to play.   

So this morning has sucked miserably, and its only 7:30 am as I am beginning to write this... 
 
First off, I overslept.  Not just 10 or 15 minutes, but a whole hour!!!  So once I awoke, I flew through the shower, threw some cloths on, and lastly hastily applied makeup.  I ran out the door and turned on my car and noticed...Shit...I don't have any gas.  Certainly not enough to get me the 25 miles to work this morning.  So I go to the gas station, swipe my card and begin fueling.  As the gas is pumping, I glance at the freeway.  It looks nice and smooth.  Thank Jebus for Friday light.  I might actually only make it in 20 minutes late.  Thats when I just so happened to look at the amount of gas that was pumping into my care.  As it approached the 9 gallon mark, I was wondering why it wasn't stopping.  It should have stopped by now.  Thats when I heard it and smelled it.  The damn pump didn't stop pumping when it was supposed to.  Gas was squirting out of my gas tank and all over the side of my car and onto the ground, and onto my tires.  I grabbed the pump and shut it off, but not before I stepped into the growing puddle of Gasoline at my feet.  Now my damn shoes (my favorite shoes) smell like gasoline and that pisses me off.  I didn't have time to clean up the gas that was on the side of my car as I was already super late for work, so I got in the car and prayed the entire way that the gas that was on the tire would not ignite from the heat of rubber on asphalt as I drove into work.  Twice I swear I smelled smoke as I was driving.  I have never been this scared in my entire life.  Never has the fear of my own car catching fire been so real.  Thankfully I made it into work. 
 
I will be spending my lunch break at a car wash today.  Lucky me.  But I NEED to get that gas off my car.  I only hope that everything will be ok.  Thaks for reading about my issues. 
 
-Ruby      

Welcome to another riveting tale of Idiots in the Workplace.  In todays edition, we will explore what happens when a Partner does not follow office protocol and makes me look like an idiot. 
 
Let me open with our office tech support protocol.  We have a small tech support team that consists of the office manager at our second office, an outside consultant, and myself.  We have a special e-mail group that if an e-mail goes there, all three of us receive it.  Now if there is any kind of problem in any office, a user is supposed to e-mail their problem to this tech support queue and it will be responded to as soon as we can get to it.  Sounds simple right?  Apparently it is not. 
 
The partner in question has not e-mailed the tech support queue in well over four months when he got a pretty nasty virus.  Here is an e-mail that he sent to the member of the tech team directly and to all of the partners in the firm.  The only things that are edited are names. 
 
"  Sarah… am getting messages saying important windows updates need to be done, but they can’t be done…I now have 3 messages.  I assume something is wrong with my settings which prevent me from implementing these updates. When I try to update it says I can’t do it…it says get help!  Is this important?…we have no guidance from our computer person(s). Also I have a message saying my files are not being backed up. Is that true?  Do I ignore this?  I wonder if others get these messages and do they(we) do anything about them or do we ignore them  Again, it would be helpful to have some general guidance from our computer person(s) about how one deals with these kind of messages, what do we do, etc.  Thanks."   
 
This e-mail was forwarded to me by my direct boss who thought that I had just been ignoring this partner and was starting to get mad at me.  I told her about not receiving any contact from him and blah blah blah.  So I started to work on this issue.  I couldn't figure it out on my own (as I am still an entry level tech), so I e-mailed our consultant for help.  This was as I was receiving e-mail after e-mail from this partner wanting some kind of protocol in place when there already is (as outlined above).  
 
Around 3 PM, another partner had had enough of the complaining.  She sent the following e-mail to all of the partners and my little tech team.  Again other peoples names are edited. 
 
" Bruce,

As always, if you have a problem with your computer, you should contact tech.  My understanding is that the tech group is exploring the issues with your computer now so you should have a resolution soon.  Meanwhile you can feel confident working on your system, according to the tech team. Virus scans are all automatic – in this instance I would ask that you get with Sarah to resolve why his computer is not automatically running virus scans – the others in the system are running automatically.  Generally we would prefer that staff do not make manual changes to setting in order to avoid slip-ups like this.

Certainly we are attempting to improve our procedures, and have made significant headway over the past few months.  James is an excellent resource in this regard, and is working with us to create a good in-house maintenance program.  We have some problems that will no doubt be up for discussion tomorrow.  Also, admittedly, we have had large issues to deal with (bandwidth, Citrix instability, etc) that are close to resolution finally.  We all look forward to the day when we can ask the tech team to take the time to develop SOPs of all processes.  Some have been done; we look forward to continuing the process going forward.  I understand your frustration but ask for continued patience – I can attest that James, Sarah and Ruby are doing their best to help us get where we all want to be, and progress is being made within the confines of the resources available." 

O...M...G... 

 Note: I Posted this over on Tested back in March.  I thought that I would share it with the GB community as well.  Enjoy.

 Welcome to the first edition of Idiots at the Workplace. 
 
Let me open with a bit of setup.  I am the Systems Admin at a CPA firm.  We have two offices.  The one that I work at is the main office which is about a 30 minute commute by car when there is no traffic.  The second office (the office that we bought out and now own) is another two and a half hours from the main office.  Now.  My office has a very simple filing system on the network for all of our clients.  It is painfully simple infact.  On our storage server (I named him Hercules) there is a special place for clients called exactly that, Clients.  Inside that folder there are another two folders, one for each office.  Inside my offices folder, there is a folder for each client named in the following schema: Last name, First name XX-XXXX, with the X's being the client number.  Inside every client folder there is a folder for each year that they have been a client.  Inside those folders there are another two folders.  One for Tax and another for Audit.  Inside each of those respective folders, is the individual files clearly labeled with what form it is and when it was scanned or created.  Its a simple system that I might have made sound a hell of a more complex then it really is.  Now the other office (who was supposed to adopt our system when we bought them) could not figure out how to adopt our system and as such lost (read: misplaced) many important client files in their mess. 

 
It is due to Office B's neglence that the partners down there decided that they needed to purchase a filing program that cost a couple thousand dollars a month.  They started implementing this in late January, LESS THEN A MONTH BEFORE TAX SEASON!!!!!  I was aginst it in that there was no way I was going to implement and get everyone in the offices familiar with a new program.  Especially since my office doesn't NEED an expensive new filing program.  I was assured by the partners from Office B that they would handle just their Office without me as they needed the program so that they could work.  I said fine, washed my hands of it, and told them that the program is their problem if it breaks.  We do not have it installed in my office while office B has it installed on their local server. 
 
Fast foward to today (March 10, 2010).     
 
I get an "urgent" e-mail from the Office Manager of Office B.  She was frantic in her e-mail.  She told me that their filing program is freezing and crashing constantly and wanted to know if I could fix it.  I told her "There is no way that I can solve the issues that you are having with GFR.  As you recall, I was not invited to sit in the training sessions that you had down in your office so that I could learn the ins an outs of the program.  You didn't even have me install the program.  How can I diagnose a problem when I have no idea how the program works?  I don't even have our account information to be able to assist you with a tech support call.  Your best bet is to call the consultant that installed the program for you and have him solve it for you or you call GFR tech support."

 
It just blows me away that they would think that I have all of the answers for them when I told them that I would not.  Its not even on the main application server (I named him Apollo) located at my office.  It is all on their local server (named Poseidon.  They are a coastal town.), was set up by an outside consultant, and no information was given to me.  A filing program issue is trivial to me at this time as our actual Tax Program is having problems.  The fact that she made it sound like there was nothing else wrong and that this GFR thing should be priority shows me that the average intellegence of the everyday office worker has gone down the drain. 
 
Thanks for reading. 
 
-Ruby

      As some of you may or may not know, I am addicted to Pokemon.  I own almost every version of the game, and own three versions on DS.  Soul Silver has become my main copy of the game, and is where I am playing my main quest right now.  Well I got the luckiest break ever today while I was playing.   
 
I got up this morning, took a shower, brushed my teeth, got dressed, and booted up my DS for 15 minutes like I do every morning.  I flew to Goldenrod city like I do every Friday to check the lucky radio number.  Guess what.  IT MATCHED.  It matched 100% one of the ID numbers of my Pokemon.  That won me my third Master Ball that I have in SoulSilver (I traded one with a Tyranitar over from my Diamond version of the game).