Sometimes my job sucks
I know I haven’t written in a while, and I know I owe at least 3 people emails. As they say around here: Sorry, sorry-o. I’ll catch up eventually — but not tomorrow. I learned today that tomorrow I’m “expected” to attend a funeral with the teaching staff (or rather, the percentage of teaching staff who deign to show up, unfortunately I live on campus so can’t escape): which, for the uninitiated, means leaving campus at 7am and returning sometime after dark. The hours in between will be spent sitting under outdoor awnings with hundreds of strangers, watching everyone around me become gradually more intoxicated, and slowly losing my hearing due to the constant (and max-volume’d) music. Funerals are social events with direct bearing on community status; very little mourning is actually done. They commonly take place weeks, even months after the deceased’s passing; the celebration itself is supposed to last 40 days.
If that came across as somehow more bitter than the average Sara, sorry-o. There’s been a lot of minutae piling on this week, and I’m somewhat upset about losing my “Saturday Beach Ritual” to a funeral. Oh well. Day-after-tomorrow’s another week, right?!
The only other thing I want to vent share is probably the most disheartening of this week’s “pile”. A few days ago, as I closed class for the day I ran into the other ICT teacher. I’d spent the week teaching classes the meaning of “Data Representation,” complete with the tiniest introduction to Base2 math and Binary numbers. The majority of the students were able to grasp the concept, but relating a pile of boring theory to the “Real World” of the computer lab was another story. So when I saw the other ICT teacher, I asked him if there were any spare computer parts on campus which I could take into classes for visual demonstrations (“This is a hard drive.” [unscrew cover, play with magnets. Prep the great “reveal” moment of magnetism=binary force.] “ooooo.”). At best I expected to get a bricked hard drive or two out of a random storage closet. In fact we did head for a random storage closet that I’d never seen.
Inside were 25 dusty, cobwebby, flashback-to-the-90s, computers.
Twenty. Five.
Let me remind you that I am teaching ICT at a school whose student body totals 1600+. With a lab of 10 working machines.
When I picked my jaw up off the floor and regained coherency, I asked my coworker why on earth we weren’t making use of these machines, and got two answers: 1, the machines belonged to a private party, though said party hadn’t visited campus since 2006. 2, as Pentium Is the machines were “too slow to run even Windows 98.” I asked for the name and phone number of the private party, trying to joke that “maybe my Obruni power can do us some good!” I never was able to resolve that angle; the best I got was that I’d need to speak with the headmaster first. So I tried the “these are perfectly good machines! There’s so much that can be done to make old computers useful!” (case in point.) I was greeted with a disbeliefing laugh as he ushered me out of the storage room and locked the door.
So today my goal was to speak with the Headmaster and let him know we could use these machines. He was out, so I spoke with the Assistant Head, who seemed not to realize the machines were there - but gave his go-ahead, with the caveat that I would “need to speak with the Headmaster first”. Sigh.
Oh, and as I walked out of his office, he alerted me to the fact that there would be a mandatory staff meeting at 9:30. In half an hour. Sigh two.
During the two hours before the the staff meeting actually began at 11:45, I chatted with a few of the other teachers. My subversive goal was to gather more information about this mysterious “private party” who apparently stored his computers in our closets. Ultimately, I got back to the same original ICT teacher who introduced me to the storage room. This time, apparently seeing that I was serious in my intent, I got the full(ish) story from him:
Unnamed “Private Party” originally brought the computers to campus in 2005, with the intent of leasing them to the school for the then-nonexistant computer lab. Sometime between that point and 2006, the school decided the lease contract was too expensive and so cancelled it. Private Party has yet to collect their machines. After much blinking and jaw-dropping on my part, this is what I was told. We have 25 antiquated computers that don’t belong to us gathering dust. The private party who originally leased them has not contacted the school, nor has the school contacted them, since 2006. The machines will continue to gather dust until either we use them or the owner retrieves them. However, in order to officially USE the computers, we would have to reactivate the lease contract. So… we have 25 antiquated computers that don’t belong to us gathering dust…
The end. If I told you I didn’t have to leave the staff room at that point and take a walk to clear the tears of frustration… I would be lying.
