about the bird
Travel day. Turkey. Today’s about the bird.
< rant
Not really. It’s about yesterday when I found myself blocked on BBO. Get this: I logged in late in the afternoon for a partnership bidding date and received a strange alert: I was automatically blocked because George booted too many people the other day when he played in the Main Bridge Club with Norberto. How can this be right? George and Norberto played twice (Monday and Tuesday or Tuesday and Wednesday, I forget), both times George used his office desktop PC. At work.
Then yesterday I logged in at home and discovered that I was in the penalty box. Frustrating. But I use a Mac and have to wander through Virtual PC before I can even get to BBO, so figuring it was some sort of OS conflict, I bailed and went into George’s home office to use his Dell. Still blocked. Asked BBO help and was told: sorry for your troubles. nobody can undo block.
But wait! It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. Wasn’t even in my house, on my network. How can this be right? The dude made it clear, he was sorry but there was nothing to be done about it, I’m in the penalty box for three days right along with George and his trigger finger. Now, it’s not a huge deal since we’re leaving today for San Fran, and since I wasn’t there to play in the Main Bridge Club anyway, but I wasn’t in the mood for guilt-by-association sanctions.
(Before you get upset about the trigger finger, here’s what happened there: Norberto had connection problems and kept dropping out. George couldn’t figure out how to reserve Norby’s seat for him, so people kept plunking themselves down in the vacant seat and refusing to leave when Norby returned. It took George 15 disconnected players before he figured out how to lock it up. Not the worst abuse of serving privileges I’ve ever seen. Certainly not worth blocking an entire family.) Anyway.
/rant >>
For everyone celebrating today, Happy Thanksgiving. I am thankful for so many things, including: the health and well-being of my family and friends (who mean everything to me) and the freedom and luxury to pursue a couple of quirky hobbies (including mostly-regular blogging). If you’re traveling, be safe. Pairs tomorrow.
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:11 am
I think BBO rocks. I can only begin to imagine how difficult it must be to manage all the complaints that they must get. I think it’s unwise to take something like this personally. I think it’s perfectly reasonable that at a free site some of the ‘crowd control’ tools be automated.
I’m GLAD that their security is sophisticated enough that if someone is out to harm the site or misbehave that that person will be stopped if he merely logs on from a new IP address or logs in under a new account name.
I’m sorry you were unwittingly caught in the net. I’m sure it was frustrating to not be able to practice bidding as planned just before a Nationals.
Best of luck to you and Geo in SF.