Tag: glitches

How Steve Jackson Games handles problems with getting product to consumers.

I just wanted to share this.  Background: I ordered a rather large and elaborate game called OGRE from Steve Jackson Games as part of a crowdfunding program known as Kickstarter.  This particular Kickstarter was very popular: too popular, in fact.  It was so popular that getting the game to print took an extra year.  But now it’s being shipped! Almost smoothly:

Many people have asked, in many different ways, when we will finish shipping. I can’t answer that until the shipping process is debugged. If we have to throw more bodies at it, we will, but right now it looks like we just need to throw more brains. There will be regular updates.

Apparently there were a couple of minor bugs in the initial rollout, but Steve Jackson Games is on top of them, retains a healthy awareness of what the actual problems are, has its top management fully involved in the process, is maintain full communications links among all levels of the company, takes responsibility for errors, and will maintain full transparency about the situation.  Because that’s how you stop small problems from becoming large ones.

Ah, the private sector.

Moe Lane

Smoke ’em if you got ’em: #Obamacare gives smokers an exchange indulgence.

Well.  At least the Obama administration is showing some creativity, somewhere.  It’s a dang shame that it has to be in the field of How To Not Implement The Damfool Ideas That We Shoved Down The Collective Throat Of America.  Ladies and gentlemen, the latest Obamacare never-mind*:

Some smokers trying to get coverage next year under President Barack Obama’s health care law may get a break from tobacco-use penalties that could have made their premiums unaffordable.

The Obama administration — in yet another health care overhaul delay — has quietly notified insurers that a computer system glitch will limit penalties that the law says the companies may charge smokers. A fix will take at least a year to put in place.

A ‘glitch.’  Yes, you may assume that I am making air quotes, there.  As would Noelle Clemente, who neutrally quotes that “[s]ome see an emerging pattern of last-minute switches and delays as the admin scrambles to prepare the Oct. 1 launch.”  Can’t imagine why people might see that.

Continue reading Smoke ’em if you got ’em: #Obamacare gives smokers an exchange indulgence.