Conf*ckers

I could write about the epic Atlanta flood of this week, but truthfully its effects have been rather minor for me. We have a small roof leak that needs to get checked out, and our basement flooded enough to extinguish the pilot light of our water heater and make everything smell all musty and gross. Most of our stuff down there is in large plastic bins and is safe. Some sentimental things of my Grandmother's were in an old fashioned suitcase and a cardboard box and those were heavily waterlogged. We did what we could to salvage it. It could have been much worse. One of our neighbors had a huge tree fall on their house. Plenty of people in this area have been completely flooded out. Some people are dead. We've had what I described above, plus some traffic delays due to road closures and accidents. Not that big of a deal.

But something has happened at work this week that is pretty awful -- our network got infected by the Conficker worm over the weekend, and we are still experiencing network problems. I hope those motherfuckers who set this thing loose in the world are proud of themselves. Today, they delayed the start of treatment for some very ill cancer patients. And worse, they caused us to have to abort the treatment of a patient that was supposed to get a high dose rate intracavitary procedure. This happened AFTER we had implanted all that hardware in her. Another patient had to wait hours for her treatment because the worm disabled our planning computer and we had to start over once it was temporarily fixed. She was miserable, and there was no good reason why she had to suffer those extra hours. We can't use about half of our treatment planning computers because the network cuts them off once the virus has been detected and then they can't be used. You clean 'em up, and then they get infected again right away. This really pisses me off. This isn't some game - it is a matter of life and death for some people. There is no indication that tomorrow will be any better. We seem to be fighting a losing battle with this damn worm. Tuesday was worse than Monday. Not a good sign.

At least the rain stopped. For now.