it's probably never a good sign to find a big guy with an extra clip of bullets on his belt when you arrive at work in the morning. i get to work this morning and find that sometime sunday evening/monday morning, our office was broken into. we were burglarized. the thief, or thieves, wore latex gloves, leaving no fingerprints. they broke into another store and entered our office through the back hallway that connects several businesses in the building. they busted the back door and stole a laptop out of the exam room and some petty cash from the cash box up front.

the oddest discovery was when i walked into our pre-exam/testing room and found the tower open. we dug around and figured that they ripped out the hard drive. isn't that odd? they didn't steal a single pair of glasses, that we could see, and none of the other computer equipment was taken. it appears to be a very specific theft. that hard drive does happen to contain some patient information, including social security numbers, names, and birthdates - pretty much all anyone would need to create some major chaos and fraud. the detective from the issaquah police department suspects that these bad people are identity thieves. i'm still hoping that they're not smart enough to dig through and access that info, though sadly, it's a small glimmer of a hope. we think that only the last three months worth of patient information is compromised, but there's no way to confirm the amount of exposure. so basically, this sucks - especially for les and teri. bad bad identity thieves - you suck.