For your edification

For those of you who haven't seen Team America: World Police and didn't get Bill's response to our IT crisis.

Re: Critical Windows Updates

From: Brown, Elizabeth
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:21 AM
To: 'William Stohner'
Subject: FW: Critical Windows Updates

al qaeda is going to try to get into our firm network

>From: IT Manager
>Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:18 AM
>To: (All Staff Members)
>Subject: Critical Windows Updates
>Importance: High

>There are some new Windows vulnerabilities that have been discovered.
Unfortunately these vulnerabilities are a serious threat to our network.
Please stay of the internet until your computer is updated. We will be monitoring and logging all web traffic today. I'm rolling out the updates today at 10:00 a.m.
>Today at 10:00 a.m. your computers will download and install windows updates. Please be sure to save your work in case of reboot. If your computer does not install the updated today, it may install the updates the following day at 10:00 a.m.
>Sorry for the inconvenience.
>If you have any questions or comments, please reply directly to me and not all staff.
>Thanks.

>IT Manager
>F** O** & L**

From: William Stohner
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:39 AM
To: Brown, Elizabeth
Subject: Re: FW: Critical Windows Updates

lol so you've been vulnerable to this for months, but now that they know about it, you can't use the internet for an hour this morning to protect yourselves... retarded

dirka dirka f** o** l** network mohammad vulnerable till 10
dirka dirka we have an hour to get in jihad jihad

Not doing work is so great

Monster Bunnies for North Korea

You girls...

So I'm in the kitchen putting my dishes in the dishwasher after lunch. There's some man in there who looks like he's fixing the coffee machine or something. So he says to me:

"Oh, finished with lunch?" (They love this ridiculous small talk here in Texas, we can't just politely pretend that the other person doesn't exist like you would do in normal society.)
"Yeah, ha ha ha."
"Did you get full?"
"Um, kind of, ha ha ha."
"Never full enough, huh? Hahahaha!"
So I'm like, "Mmmm, yeah, ha ha," and am walking out of the kitchen, when he says
"You girls, I know how you are, never full enough! Hahahaha!"
What does this mean???? I'm kind of disturbed.

Mentally done with work for the day

While I was gone, Margo decided that the arrangement of the shelves in my "space" was "just not right," so she took away half of my shelves, and put in some little cabinet, which I would never use unless I was hiding something, right in front of the shelves that I still do have. Why you would move someone's office furniture around while they were gone will be eternally beyond me.

I will be spending the next hour deciding whether I should buy into the patent-leather-shoes trend, and if so, whether I should get flats or pumps or both. Any input would be appreciated.

I'll give an update on Paris and the Homeland Security fiasco, including my terrorist doppelganger in Richmond, VA, when I get home.

The clock in my car is finally right!

Re: My pretty office

And no... this cannot wait, even though I'll be out of the office all next week. It has to be done today. She has now recruited other people, who apparently have no work to do, either, to help move shelves and fake palms and screens around.

After it was all finished, Patsy came over to exclaim over how much better my "space" looked, how much more room I had... I mean this is not my bedroom. I don't need more light from some ugly tiny little 15-watt lamp, I don't need "more privacy" from another fake plant, I don't need a 3-by-3-inch rattan basket for "more storage space." Just leave me alone and let me do work already. I think they are all a little disconcerted because, as you probably know, I'm not very good at expressing excitement when I do feel it, let alone when I don't, so it's really hard for me to be super-psyched about taking an hour out of my day to put in one shelf.

On a more exciting note, I'm meeting someone from Craigslist this afternoon to buy a copy of Microsoft Office 2007, I guess Microsoft had some kind of launch event and gave out free copies, and this person is selling his for less than half of the retail price. I guess people are selling these launch copies for so little is because there's no hard-copy of the CDs or the documentation, it's just the product key, so you have to download the actual application online, which I already did to use the free 60-day trial. Which means that if no one hears from me for a few days, I've been kidnapped. But we are meeting in a nice public place in the middle of the day.

Ugh and then Patsy just came over to say "Hahahaha, it's hard to keep stuff off the floor, huh?" because I haven't had time to put all the stuff back on the shelves from when I had to take everything off to move them because I have work to do. Which I told her. GO DO SOME WORK. God.

My pretty office

So they moved my desk a couple of weeks ago. I was in this side room, basically the entire office was in one section, and then four people, including me, were in this other room. Which at first I hated, but the women who were in that room were pretty nice, and I sat right in a small room with them so I could talk to them.

Then they decided to move me. It was allegedly so that I would be closer to my two attorneys, but I really feel like there was some other weird reason, like maybe the woman who was sitting where I sit now, they wanted her to be somewhere else. I just know that they really were pushing me to like my new desk. So anyway the new desk is like, they basically made an office out of a space in the hallway, and then put up a screen, like a wooden folding screen, and a tall fake plant to create "privacy." So everyone else around me is in offices, real offices with doors, and I'm in the hallway. Every time someone walks by, I hear it, every time people stand out in the hallway talking, I hear it. But, there's no one around me, if I wanted to like, look at another human being's face. And everyone I talk to is like, "Sooooo, how are you liking your new space? Is it more quiet?" My supervisor, Patsy, asked me that, and I was like, "Well I like it, I have more room, but no, it's really not more quiet at all, I can hear everyone walking by and talking all around me." I don't understand why everyone thinks this would be more quiet, it's really odd.

Then yesterday I find out that this other paralegal used to work at this desk, but there was no screen or plant, she was just at a desk in the middle of the hallway, and her attorney didn't like it, so her attorney bought the screen and plant with her own money. Now this woman, Margo (who's apparently the office like, interior decorator because she spends all day moving fake plants around), comes over today and is like, you know I'm thinking of giving you more shelves because it looks like you don't have enough room, you're keeping files on the floor. Which is true, I have piles of files on the floor, but they're files that the attorneys bring in for me or whatever, it's just easier. So I said, yeah but it's not a problem, it works for me. Well, apparently the attorney who "designed" this area is "really funny" about it and needs it to look nice, and files on the floor make it look not-nice, so they're going to disrupt my day to bring in more shelves, that I don't need, and won't be able to access because the way they are going to move the shelves will put the majority of them behind my desk. But it'll look prettier I guess, so it's all worth it. This is the same woman who on my first day occupied an hour and half moving the shelves in my cubicle around so that you wouldn't be able to see the electrical outlet because it was "so ugly." Don't these people have to work to do???

I'm famous!!

I googled my blog, and someone linked to it! And it was a news source that reports on an issue dear to my heart: Bird Flu Breaking News. See that, it says "the Best Bird Flu Blogs." I am officially one of The Best Bird Flu Blogs. I think I need an awards section.

P.S. - I just discovered how to post to my blog from email. Meaning I will be posting all day long from work.

I'm back, and it's important: Dead Birds.

So maybe you've heard about these dead birds they found on the street in Austin, the ones that turned my fifteen- minute morning commute into an hour-and-fifteen-minute iron-clad-excuse-to-be-late- to-work. Well they've pretty much ruled out bird flu, or at least they're claiming to. But I want to know, does anyone think I can somehow like, whip the mob up into a frenzy and get Austin to ban fowl kept as livestock inside the city, namely the rooster next door? I mean it's kind of barbaric in this day and age to have livestock, filthy birds, in an urban area. We are living right on top of each other, and I can smell their chicken coop (can salmonella be air-borne?). I feel like I could start some kind of fear-mongering campaign. I mean it's really pretty archaic that people should be allowed to have these birds. Any thoughts?