Stupid people and WOW

Well, it’s another drill weekend and I’m sitting here at work. Actually, when I post this, I’m not sitting at work, but while I’m thinking and typing up the rough draft, I am. We have so many stupid people that have access to computers at work that the network folks have had to lock down all kinds of access to the outside world. You can’t blame them. Most people now-a-days can use a computer to send an email and look at the news, but that’s about it when it comes to “expertise.” Most just aren’t smart enough to grasp the concept that you don’t click on EVERY link that’s sent to you, that they didn’t really win a lottery in England (although they have NEVER been to England) that there really isn’t some dude in Africa that needs your help to transfer 10 million dollars to the US, and so on and so on. So, since these people are too naive, stupid, trusting or whatever you want to call it, our access to the outside world from work is severely limited. Some of the sites we can’t get to are site like Blogger (where my blog is located), MySpace, YouTube, of course, porn sites and they’ve even forbidden access to eBay. Every one of those sites could eat up an entire day’s productivity if people around here could get to them. The funniest part about that? When they forbade eBay, our Helpdesk actually had calls from idiots complaining that they couldn’t get to their eBay accounts. Now, you already know you aren’t supposed to be hitting those sites while you’re at work and now you’re going to be stupid enough to call the Helpdesk and complain about it? Yeah, now you can see why they had to install Nazi Server 6.0 on our Internet access.
Being here this weekend is good and bad. It’s an off weekend so no one else is here but about 3 of us. Our regularly scheduled UTA weekend was back on 31 March-1 April. I had my Rescue Class that weekend, so I rescheduled to this weekend. As far I as knew there was nothing going on so this would be a good weekend to make it up. WRONG!!! Dive Buddy Dee and some folks decided to go diving in the FL springs this weekend. They went down on Thursday, went diving on Friday, stayed the night are diving again today. They may even stay the night again and dive some more tomorrow. So, I’m missing out on that. Then, I get a call from Scuba Steve last night. He was put on a check dive trip at the last minute and had to go to Florida with some students this weekend. He called me last night to see if I could go and give him a hand with the students. Dang. The one weekend I pick to make up a weekend because there is nothing going on and I miss two dive trips. What are the odds? Oh well, there will be plenty of time to dive on other weekends. Still sucks though.
There really isn’t a lot going on this week. I still haven’t sold my truck yet. It’s in the Credit Union Bulletin and I have flyers around Base. I’ll probably put it on the Lemon Lot next week and see how that goes.
Tiny Baby and #1 Mom are doing very good. I just loaded up a few new pictures and a video of her on my MySpace page. (Link to the right of this column) So, if you get a chance, go check out that vid. It’s pretty funny.

I just remembered about a couple of stops we had to make yesterday and I must pass that story on to you. I work with a couple of guys that play “World of Warcraft.” They are playing a few nights a week and quite a bit on the weekends. They talk about all this stuff and I have no idea what they’re talking about. I know what the game is, but that’s as far as my knowledge goes. Well something having to do with the game was being released this past Friday, so they had to go find it downtown. Some kind of cards or something. So, our first stop was in a Comic Book store. After we left, I congratulated them on taking me to the very first store in my 42 years of life that I had no desire to look at even one thing in that entire place. I walked in, saw some tables in the middle and plopped down into one while they did their shopping. It was Geek Central. But, that wasn’t the highlight of the day, I’m afraid. The UPS guy hadn’t run yet, so they didn’t have the stuff they were looking for, so we headed over to the local Majik shop in town. Yeah, it’s a place that sells all kinds of Wiccan stuff. Books of witchcraft, herbs for potions, spell books, you name it. I was going to ask if Piper, Phoebe or Paige were there and if I could see the “Book of Shadows.” But, I decided to keep my mouth shut. Then as we walked around the back, there were bongs of all types all over the place. But, you weren’t allowed to call them bongs. They were “water pipes” or “tobacco pipes.” If you called them a bong, they would kick you out of the store. And you had to promise you were only going to use them with legal smoking stuff. Ok, so they were only for use with legal smoking material, yet there were little gram scales for sale in the same area. I guess when you want to scale out your dime bag of good ‘ol homegrown North Carolina Menthol, you could do it precisely.. But you can’t use it with marijuana.. We won’t even go into the massive amount of pipes and all the other things you could smoke your legal tobacco in. Seems to me, it would be a whole lot cheaper to just buy some Marlboro’s than to spend that kind of money on a big multi-person “water pipe.” Umm, yeah.. When was the last time you’ve seen six people take a hit off the same cigarette??

On top of all this drug stuff, the store clerk was a massive World of Warcraft geek…errr, player. To hear him talk about the people that come over to the shop on Friday and Saturday nights to play just gave me the willies. As much as I have tried to put this experience into words, for the first time, I didn’t quite capture the moment. I guess you just had to be there. But, honestly, be glad you weren’t.