Tempestuous Fury

21072007T0926: Week 6 and 7 in the Outback with Mountain Man were entertaining, with nothing of great note happening during week 6. Everything for that week was business as usual and normal, just overbooked and crowded. Of note was really last weekend: I was discovered as the so-called “hacker” of the Linksys router that Internet ran through. Oh well; that’s what happens when you let anyone else know what happened. I knew the risks and the high likelihood of getting caught, but I had to have my Moses moment and declare that Internet connectivity had been restored. The analysis was simple: worst case scenario, I get found out and then fired, meaning I don’t have to carry 60 and 70 pound pack loads out to Mountain Man camp anymore. It’d be fair to say that I didn’t care.

Most likely I got ratted out by FNGs. That’s a fairly traditional camp term for the new staffers out here, and I don’t like using it very often because of certain connotations that I feel it carries that I don’t like. However, in this case I feel the term is very appropriate. They truly are morons. No sooner than the camp director going public after two weeks and announcing that the perpertrator will be fired than the whole camp knows. Those shits took what I gave them and then screwed me. Such is human gratitude. How irritating. You try to be public spirited, and you get spit in your eye. Honestly, next time I’ll just stick with the standard high level secrecy and deniability for such pranks.

Anyhow, I am still employed through week 8. They called me in on Monday just as Mountain Man was trying to leave camp for the week, and then had me sit around while something else was taken care of despite my constant warnings that I had to go. Then they finally called me in, and I got busted. Blah blah blah, the only thing of note was that I suspect the camp director told me something VERY dishonest to save face when I cornered him by offering my expertise (but I never bothered to confirm it). Basically, I told him that one of the main problems was that there seemed to be a bandwidth cap with the satellite broadband, and that was the source of the major slowdown that sometimes happened: They were throttling us big time when we exceeded our limit. I then told him the major source of this was staffers going through insanely bandwidth intensive Myspace sites with steaming music and the works, poorly designed by retards. Well, not that last, that was just how I felt. I said I could fix that by banning myspace, but still permitting email, IM, and most other forms of contact, thus keeping our Internet connection good and not throttled. The camp director responded by saying that they were increasing the bandwidth cap, and that’s what I suspect the lie was. That would imply that the director actually cared about staffers like me, when I know he doesn’t because he keeps wildly overbooking everything for money numbers. Which brings me to point 2: money. More bandwidth is more money, which I mentioned, figuring it’d be the kicker that won my argument. That’s where he did the out of character thing and said more bandwidth because he cared about the staff on the weekends, etc. Yeah right; if he cared, he wouldn’t have left the MAC filtering on to start with when he left early. He already told me in the same conversation that he didn’t think it’d be a big deal; “no one was in camp.” Har har. And point 3: the business manager looked momentarily surprised when the camp director said the bandwidth cap was being upped, as if he was thinking, “We did that? Since when?” So, I suspect dishonesty occurred. I can’t confirm it, but I really don’t care to.

Anyway, I managed to not get fired because Mountain Man Bob stood in the door on the issue. Staff is already undermanned in many areas, and they couldn’t afford to lose an experienced Outback staffer such as myself with no replacement. David the camp director was willing to overlook good sense because his pride had been hurt, but Bob forcefully brought him back to reality as I understand it, and so I will stay on.

In life, I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit, and I have decided that I am not going back into surveying and mapping again in the business world. It’s a decision that I’ve been pondering for quite a while now, and I finally settled it for good on Thursday night on a little walk by myself around Mountain Man camp. Looking back, I realized that I couldn’t remember much of anything about life of the past year in Orlando; it had all faded to almost nothingness, such was the unpleasantness of it. Basically, I couldn’t recall much beyond staff week of camp in detail. I was aware that unpleasant memories are suppressed by the mind, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything quite like this before. Well, perhaps certain parts of the college experience relating to study, which I did quite a bit of in my final year, are similar, but I can at least remember many of the details and I did learn some stuff. With this gig in Orlando, it’s really just a blurb, and not a very big one at that. I’m getting out of this.

In hobbies, I’ve decided to consider serious involvement in tournament poker. Nothing crazy, just low buy-in type tournaments. No words will be spoken about how or why I am now considering this, other than to say that I really should put to use the theory I read a long time ago, and the fact that I was actually surprisingly effective on a particular night at it recently. I suppose it could count as my foray into the world of sports as well, something which I’ve taken an extremely low interest until lately.