News Bulletin: IT Companies Around The Globe Forced To Schedule “Dark Days”

Fiscal September will come to a very strange close for many IT companies who collectively announced today that they would go dark in the last week of the month. A spokesperson for IBM gave the following statement, nearly identical to statements given by upwards of ten thousand different companies worldwide:

Unusually, over ninety percent of our techs have requested time off during this week of the year. We typically handle our requests for time off in a simple “first come first serve” manner, but when we began telling our employees that we couldn’t fulfill their requests they began raving and violently thrashing about our offices. We were concerned at first, but when we realized how many of our peers in the industry were experiencing the same thing we realized it would just be best to just let them take the week off.

A spokesperson for Symantec detailed their rationale for the decision:

Honestly, it works out best for our company. Our employees have vacation time that they are entitled to. Going dark for this week, during a relatively slow period of business in the year, allows us to ensure that our staff will be at optimal efficiency going into what is sure to be another very profitable fourth quarter.

EMC Corporation gave the following statement as well:

This event is eerily similar to what we went through during the second week of fiscal December back in 2010, when the majority of our employees all called out sick during the exact same days. We never discovered the exact reasoning behind the mass unavailability of our employees, but considering that it had little to no effect on our business we’re really not too concerned with going dark between September 23 and September 28.

We highly recommend checking any networks that you or your company uses prior to these dates, as finding a support technician will be very difficult during this time. We are doubtful that we’ll learn what is going on behind these strange occurrences, but we’ll be sure to get that information to you if it ever becomes available.

Mutual Funds vs. Individual Stocks

There's money to be made.

I want to take a moment to discuss something that doesn’t come up often enough on World of Warcraft blogs and that’s the topic of finances.  The inherent truth of the matter is than when you are playing World of Warcraft, you are not working.  When you are not working, you are generally also not making money.

Investing changes all of that.

For those of you that are completely unfamiliar with the concept of investing, let me introduce it to you.  Imagine that Farendin has just started his reforging company in Orgrimmar, but it’s just getting off the ground.  He doesn’t have a whole lot of money and right now he can barely afford to pay Godan rent.

This is where you come in.

You give Farendin 1000 gold, chump change to a big baller like yourself, and Farendin agrees to give you a percentage of his profits.  All of a sudden, reforging is a huge hit and you’re rolling in the dough.  But there are drawbacks too.  If Farendin runs a shitty company because he sucks balls then your 1000 gold is going right down the drain.  You should have done some more research on his stupid concept of reforging before you just threw all that money at him.

Investing in real life works the exact same way.  But what exactly is the difference between an individual stock and a mutual fund?  Well, let’s say you’re too tired or stupid or lazy to actually do any research on reforging.  You can pay a company like Blackrock Financial Management to do all of the work for you.  They might also invest some of your money with Yelmak or Magar or Nogg but you can rest assured that they will always make a good decision and you will be making free money.

That’s how a mutual fund works, I think.  I’m not entirely sure but the bottom line is that with individual stocks you will sometimes lose money and with mutual funds you will never lose any money.  So go do some investing instead of wasting all that glorious potential!