Aimless Wandering

Maybe it’s me, maybe my expectations are a little high. I’ve been known to be a bit demanding at times.

However, I would think that if you put on your resume that your experienced with Microsoft Office products… That if you tell a classroom full of students that you have 10 years of experience with the Microsoft Office suite… That if you had been spending the last 3 months reviewing our courses… That if you told me that you were an “expert” with Microsoft Excel…

With all of that, plus notification a month in advance that you were going to be expected to actively assist with instructing and Introduction to Excel class, I would think that it would be an absolute piece of cake for you to teach a chapter or two of the class.

You’re supposed to be a knowledgeable and experienced training professional right? So an Introduction to Excel class where the most difficult concept is the Auto Sum button should be a piece of cake…

However, I’m apparently smoking crack since you told me you were unfamiliar with the material and therefore uncomfortable teaching it.

Yes, it’s been one of those weeks at my office…

No, I haven’t forgotten about this site.  I’ve been struggling for inspiration that wasn’t something I try to avoid posting about.So I start off this latest return with a rant.We use Microsoft Outlook as the e-mail client where I work.  It’s been the standard for years, and folks have grown accustomed to being able to format text and have pretty pictures in their signatures and such.Now a few months ago our IT security folks recognized the bazillions of security threats as well as the fact that when it comes to protecting our network, our biggest security threat is the blatent laziness and stupidity of our users.   As a result the put forth a mandatory security policy - All e-mail sent or received will be in plain text and not HTML or rich text.  Any formating you make in the message will be blocked when the message is sent, messages from outside the organization have their formatting stripped off.  It’s an automatic thing so users don’t have a choice in the matter.  The whole idea is to prevent some malicious code from firing in an e-mail when they view it.Users being users have of course figured out a way around this.  They quickly realized that even though their messages aren’t displayed in HTML or rich text, all that they needed to do is click on a spot in the header, and poof all the formatting would return.This has led to folks going back to the old way of changing fonts and adding colors in their e-mail and then adding the phrase View In HTML to tell their recipients how to view all the bold fonts and the like.  Of course it’s so over used that it’s a joke.  Folks make one word bold or three words italic and they want us to view their message in HTML, or they decide that they want their message in Arial instead of the Times New Roman font that plain text uses. My favorite, when people don’t do anything to their message - yet still tell you to View in HTML. 

I just got back from an unscheduled trip down to Florida. I’ve said it before here, and I still firmly believe that the greatest people watching experience you can have is in an airport, and this trip didn’t disappoint.

Take this question I heard asked of an airline baggage agent in Fort Lauderdale by not one but two people:

“I didn’t catch my bag when it went around the carousel the first time… Will it come back out again?”

Then there was the couple who tried to bring what appeared to be a jug of skin cream in their carry on. I didn’t stick around to watch the situation unfold at the security checkpoint – although I saw them wandering around about 20 minutes later.

Finally, after flying to or through at least 2 dozen airports and never having a problem getting around… On this trip, this was the first time I have EVER gotten lost in an airport! I have always avoided Houston Intercontinental like the plague because I had heard so many bad things about it. This was the first time I have ever actually flown to the airport, and I’ve got to say while the terminals are nice, their signage sucks! It’s a sprawling monstrosity that is extremely difficult to navigate.

In case you missed it, this past week several men were arrested in connection with a plot to blow up fuel tanks at New York’s Kennedy Airport.  If the plot went as they expected by blowing up the fuel tanks they would have triggered some sort of chain reaction that would have caused explosions to spread throughout the airport’s fuel pipelines blowing up aircraft at the gates and destroying much of the airport. Additional explosions would have also damaged nearby neighborhoods as well… Sounds pretty scary… Too bad it never could have happened the way these folks could have envisioned it.

Now don’t get me wrong, the arrest of this group of folks is without a doubt a score for the good guys. Even if they had managed to try and put this plan into action they would have done some serious damage… just not the apocalyptic scenario that they dreamed of.

While the newsreaders on your favorite media outlet are breathlessly reciting the details of what these guys wanted to happen, most of them are forgetting what would have actually happened if they had pulled this off. Thanks to the safeguards that are pretty much standard in fuel tank farms like the one these guys were targeting, they would have caused a big boom. If they had managed to blow up one or more of these tanks there would have been a large fire in the tank farm, the airport might even have closed for a bit while the fire raged. However, thanks to the fire suppression and leak prevention systems in place that fire would be contained to the tank farm. It wouldn’t go traveling along the pipeline causing horrific damage, it wouldn’t have been the flaming wall of destruction that these guys thought they would create.

Heck back in the ’80s there was an event similar to what they were trying to cause. A train derailed outside a Southern California neighborhood, as the train derailed it ruptured a pressurized gasoline pipeline that ran along the tracks. The gasoline spewing from the pipe ignited - initially causing a huge fireball. The rupture though was detected by pressure sensors in the pipeline which automatically closed valves shutting off the flow of gas. The residual gas in the pipe quickly burned off, and starved of fuel the fire went out.

If there was an explosion in one of these tanks, pressure sensors in the pipelines would close cutting off the fire (and fuel) and preventing the fire from spreading along the pipes to the airport.

This is the second group in the last few months that was arrested for plotting these grandiose plots that in reality don’t have a chance working as envisioned. How about the guys who thought that they could cause mass death and destruction on Fort Dix in NJ. I have no doubt they they could figure out a way to slip past security and get a few shot off, maybe get into a building… From the time that they fired their first shot I’d give them a life expectancy of 5 minutes tops. By then if the MP’s didn’t get them, one of the thousands of soldiers on that base with access to a wide assortment of weapons probably would. It would be an attack that would get tons of media attention for it’s boldness - and tons of ridicule for it’s outright stupidity.

However, morons like these folks are probably great for law enforcement folks. If they are plotting stupid attacks like these then they probably aren’t very bright to begin with and as a result probably make stupid mistakes that make it easy for them to be caught…