Too ironic, in a sad way

False Alarm Policy Delayed Response During Atlanta Courthouse Murders
Verification attempt designed to reduce false alarms, deputy attempted to
verify alarm four times.

ATLANTA -- When a gunman opened fire at the county courthouse in March, a
deputy followed a new policy and tried four times to verify a distress call
before sending help, a newspaper reported Friday.

The policy, aimed at reducing time wasted on false alarms, was issued in
January by one of the people killed in the rampage, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution reported.

(I need a tutorial on blog hyperlinks) This is a lot easier now.

OSHA DART list

See who's hurting their employees more than average at the OSHA DART list.

There's a .dbf file that can be downloaded and read in MS Excel. There are
13,919 companies on the list, but some states are missing altogether - they
have their own OSHA departments.

Of interest to me:
JONES DAIRY FARM FORT ATKINSON WI
REDI-SERVE FOODS LTD PARTNR FORT ATKINSON WI
WISCONSIN PACKAGING CORP FORT ATKINSON WI

Lots of health care facilities on the list too.

Ground control to Major Tom

(maybe I should use song titles for all my subjects)

Posting this via the email option to see how it performs.

If it works well, I'll take Harvey's advice (over at www.badexample.mu.nu in
his 'How to Start Blogging' area) and post a little background.

OK, fine

I guess I'll post something. How about a rant?

We send certificates of analysis to customers all the time. It's just a way to report to them the manufacturing date and results of chemical analysis. Making one is a manual operation - we pull up the last certificate we did and change the pertinent info. This is all in MS Word, so it's easy to make mistakes. Well, I double check them but missed where the person had the year as '04 instead of '05. Yeah, it looks dumb on our part, but whatever, not the end of the world, right? They find it and we fix it within the hour.

But I guess that's not enough. Some higher up on their end sends a note to my boss - about how these certificate errors are "disturbing".

Disturbing.

Huh? Disturbing? Yeah, right. You know what's disturbing? Kids starving in America, that's disturbing. Ethnic cleansing is disturbing. Goofing up a date?

Whatever. These guys must have a pretty inflated opinion of themselves if our little goof up wastes a little bit of their day and it's therefore disturbing.