PlayStation Network Gone Wild!
by MJG74, HSM Art Director
This is an unauthorized publication of diary entries, between April and early May 2011, belonging to the PlayStation Network. It is re-published as is, without any grammatical improvements or edits.
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Dear Diary,
You probably heard I was hacked. Most of the world has, and yes it is true. I cried 01001001110 for most of the night. Thankfully the first responders came in when they did and shut the violators out. It was a relief to be offline, and the nightmare was over.
Dear Diary,
The next day I returned to work. I felt ok; I punch in at the time clock next to the water cooler outside of Drake’s Office (we are old drinking buddies, from back to the fortune days), but before I could pop in and say hello, the big boss calls me into his office.
He said to me he was concerned for my well being and that I should take a few weeks off and get some therapy before I returned to work. I told him I was OK, that I’m good, I’m still the network of old.
He assured me he knew I was able to return to my job, but after such an emotional and traumatic event, it is company policy that the affected employee takes time off, for evaluation.
At first I was confused, a little angry too, but after a long conversation over tea and animal crackers, we both agreed that some time off would do me some good.
He then gave me a few names and flyers of some counselors and rehabilitation centers, not to mention a company credit card to pay for all of it, plus travel and lodging expenses.
I went home, card in hand. I read all the material, and I thought to myself, “Why relive this bad experience, just to talk to a therapist, have he or she prescribe some rehabilitation and counseling, when I can take this cash and go have one wild vacation!?!?”
I have not had a true vacation since I started working for Sony; sure, I had some breaks, mostly for check ups and maintenance, but never a true vacation. This will be my rumspringa, I’m going wild!!
Dear Diary,
Day one of my vacation, (on Sony’s tab lol) and this is it. My first thing I wanted to do was jump from an airplane. Why? I gotta do something great, BIG… something I never would have thought I’d do in my whole entire life until today. I needed something a little more extreme to start this amazing trip here. The cake is missing the icing and I’m going to put it icing on, then I’m going to eat the cake!
I booked my spot and since then I’ve been having mixed feelings about this. I was all excited most of the time until about two hours before. I have to admit, I was feeling a little jittery, butterflies in the stomach, nervous, anxious and yet… I can’t wait for the peak of the performance.
It was too late to chicken out. I drove 1 hour and 10 minutes to get to the place and I’m not turning around. My hands and my feet were sweating, like wet kind.. I know, EEW! I was trying to calm myself down by thinking bout allot of things on my way there and it did help a little bit.
I walked in, thinking to myself… THIS IS IT! I’m definitely going to do this. I want extreme and this is extreme. I’m going to make myself proud. I ONLY DO EVERYTHING, DAMMIT. Registered at the counter and was told to view a 10 minutes video. Can’t remember much what the video said but the most vivid thing I remembered was the risks of skydiving (well obviously, as it got me even more nervous than before). Death is definitely one of the risks of skydiving, they were showing pictures of ambulance etc.. And clearly, it didn’t help to calm my nerves!
Then I was given a contract to sign. So many terms and conditions, ( now I know how the 70+ million of my users feel) I’m not allowed to sue should anything happened to me, so basically I’m doing this on freewill with no strings attached la.. I signed everything, showed my id, paid a huge amount for it *ouch* and then I’m good to go!
Was then directed into a room where a man suited me up, at the same time telling me the do’s and don’t’s.
Minutes later, I’m all ready to rock!
We boarded the small plane waiting to fly us up and we sat “stacked” inside the plane. Like one person went in, open his leg, second person sit in between the first person’s legs and opened up his legs and so on. We flew up, higher and higher. At one point, excitement took over me more than fear. I was in awe with the sight of the view from the plane. Everyone was cracking jokes in the plane to ease the tension of the first timers.
When we reached 13,500 feet, one of the cameraman opened up the door and just like…. flew out and disappeared @_@ I was like… THAT WAS FAST. Then one by one flew out, I was getting more and more nervous. I was told to get on my knees while my tandem master strapped himself tight onto me. Then we slowly crawled to the opening. He position my head to lean against his shoulder, both my hands crossed in front of my chest and I thought to myself..
What the hell was I thinking getting myself into this….before I could even finish thinking of it, we fell… like free falling down, 60 seconds of free fall. I was sooooooo scared in the beginning, I closed my eyes for a few seconds then opened them up again, I’ve came too far to waste all this by keeping my eyes closed.
60 seconds of free fall seemed to past too fast. Like waaaaaay too fast. I saw the cloud below and I can’t believe we’re going to fall through it. And all this time I was wondering how it’ll be like to be in among the clouds! But then before I knew it, we did it. I was so frighten I would hit a bird,( note to self) not much to see in a cloud.
Lower and lower we come, the ground quickly approaching. Knees up! My feet should only touch the ground after his. When I landed, the first thing I yelled out was AWESOMEEEEE!!!
Then I gave the cameraman a big high five and proceeded to thank the tandem master, gave him a big hug thanking him for making my day. You bet it did!
Dear Diary,
My vacation is getting wilder, I was at a party in the woods with a lot of people around a fire. I was drinking a 1 liter bottle of something. Finished it with some friends. I must have had at least half of it. Then I started drinking something else. Which itself was a very bad idea .
Fast forward a bit, the cops show up and everybody bolts. Couple of buddies and I run to the railroad tracks and take them all the way back to my house. When we get there everybody from the party is already in my garage. Now mind you I have a two car garage that is not connected to my house. On top of that our house was located on the property of a garage door company. This area had lots of space and a lot of commercial trucks. Now by then I was completely obliterated. I was falling on the ground and passing out all over the place. I eventually passed out on my bathroom floor. Literally there were people coming in and stepping over me. 
Fast forward about an hour later and my buddy comes in yelling ” Yo this kid just stole pizza from you!” Apparently someone came into my kitchen and raided my fridge and took some leftover pizza. I flipped. Jumped up out of my coma and ran out screaming “You want to steal pizza from me!!” Who am I fighting??” I may have overreacted a little. Turns out the kid that came in to tell me was already fighting him. Yet I was still screaming “Who am I fighting?” As well as ripping off my shirt.. So this must have looked funny This big “chick” mind you comes and picks me up and carries me out of there. Drops me and I instantly fall on the ground out cold. Getting so worked up and being so tipsy just knocked me out.
Fast forward I’m back up. Now because of all the yelling from the fight, you guessed it. The cops show up again. And once again everybody bolts but this time a few people were caught. Myself and about 8 other people make it into the house and just watch and wait. Now while watching talk to the few people they had stopped I see my garage lights are on and I think to myself” oh no, if they see the lights they will see all the drinks and know we were in there partying So then I think I’m going to have to go James Bond style out there and turn them off. And I snuck out there in my backyard humming the James Bond theme song to myself . Switched ‘em of and got back in safe luckily. Now I don’t remember much after that. I actually don’t remember much of it at all. This is what I have been told. But I ended up passing out on my bed. It’s basically the end of the night and about 9 or 10 people ended up sleeping in my room. Woke up at about 11 o’clock the next day trying to piece together what happened last night along with having the worst headache I’ve ever had.. Later on I go outside while the business next door is open. Outside I find cans everywhere, garbage everywhere. Clothing and balloon wrappers everywhere, come to find out later some people had fun on top of those commercial trucks. Ew. Don’t glitch my bench, bro.
Dear Diary,
After the party, my friend had a crazy idea. Seeing that I had Sonys credit card, why not fly to England and photobomb the biggest wedding of all time. We got on the first flight over. We arrived in Heathrow at 1am British time. We rent a car, a mini. Security was tight, I got pulled over twice for driving on the right side of the road, to only find out it’s the wrong side – it was sooo confusing.
Our plan was to get to the abbey around 3am sneak in with the help, find a pew to call under take a nap and pop up for the wedding. Our only problem was what to wear — we did not pack any dress clothes, or any clothes. All I had was the clothes on my back, my default jeans and a blue Playstation Home t-shirt.
My friend had a brilliant idea; we would rent costumes – seeing everyone 
would be dressed like Halloween anyway, we’d fit right in. We found an all-night costume shop on the outskirts of the city. Besides a few eyebrow-arching costumes all they had was Donald trump costumes. I took the Trump, leaving the hair on the shelf. I thought the black suit and pink tie would fit in with the royal look. My friend dressed like King Fahd or something. You can see him next to me.
We had a blast the wedding made me cry, I’m such a little girl when it comes to romance. Although the Queen did make me laugh, she fell asleep during the ceremony and we could hear her snoring from a few rows back.
Dear Diary,
Back in the states now, after crashing the wedding my friend and I flew to Montana for what was to be two days and nights, and I’m not even going into what happened because I frankly don’t remember.
(Note to self: Patrón Silver and solid-state hard drives don’t mix well. Damn though.)
Dear Diary,
Broke and hungry we wandered this mountainside town for a few hours trying to find a way back home. Luckily for us a rodeo was in town. Given that I was somewhat recognizable by the locals, ( I am the PlayStation Network after all) I was offered a gig as a buffalo rider in their main event. I thought how hard can this be, I road a horse in red dead redemption, and buffalos are big but slow, right? It should be easy…
Oh how was I wrong!! Not only was this beast hard to ride he was bucking and kicking and did everything possible to get me off his back. If that was not bad enough they added a flaming hoop into the show! The hoop was too small, or the buffalo was too big, either way you see it, it burned part of my triangle off, now I have the letter V on the top of my head. The guys in trademarks and marketing are going to be so angry over this.
Dear Diary,
Made enough money to fly back home. It was not the best of homecomings; I got home to only find angry messages on my voice mail from my boss at Sony. Apparently between my vacation and the theft of the credit card, the bill is in the high six or seven figures. I don’t know exactly what the damage is, but to keep my job I will have to pay it back. The plan is I will have to work 30 days on the premium plus servers for free.
That’s it for me, I’m going back to work soon – and I have learned my lesson, no more vacations. Hackers suck.
May 12th, 2011 by MJG74 | 8 comments
Michael Goss is the Art Director (emeritus) for HomeStation Magazine. In real life, is a normal member of the human species with some imperfections, but with a strength of ten as well, I kid ye not! He also has been know to exaggerate the details from time to time. His goal is to live fearlessly but finds that kinda difficult with current crop of republicans running for office.
Thanks for making me laugh :> this has been the most aggravating time in the history of psn. Keep it up because I would like to share your humorous diary with online friends!
Dear PSN: Have you considered doing this kind of thing as a Twitter feed? It really worked for that cobra from the Bronx Zoo. Just saying…
That is the most ingenious thing I have seen come out of this outage and one of the funniest too. Where have you been Mike? I hope this is one of many more articles we can expect from you, all I can say is ROFL!!!
“Thunderous applause!!!”
Great read with my morning coffee! Delightful and the garage party sounds much like my sons parties when I’m gone for the weekend…arrggh!
lol. nice take on wha the PSN has been up to. Cant wait for him to get back to work, well rested and partied out.
I should have guessed that the PSN would turn out to be a young male of the slacker / party animal variety.
Loved it
I really hope the folks at Sony are reading HSM while this outage is going on. I suspect they need all the laughs they can get at this point.