Madness at the School District during the Summer

[reddalek.livejournal.com]

First time posting something here instead of just comments so here we go...

First an intro...

I am a System Administrator\tech support rep\angry field tech for a K-12 school district. This is the magical time of the year when most of the noisy, ungrateful students have gone on summer vacation and things quiet down. It is quiet most of the time with no one really around to bug me about their problems.

Note I stated "most of the noisy, ungrateful students" above as in this district, we have summer school. Therefore it isn't completely dead around here, as there is still people around to break, I mean "use things".

The ironic thing is I work at a school district and I generally dislike most children. (as well as staff that act as children)

Go figure.

Now for today's gripe:

We have several laptop carts that are for student use. Someone wanted to use the carts for a class and did some things to piss me off today. Let us review the sins:

1.) Being vague on what actually needs to be ready with the laptops.
2.) Not telling me when you will be around in case I have questions and not leaving any contact info.
3.) Showing up much later and taking the carts out of the secure area so when I arrive to look at the laptops after I figure out your vague demands, they are gone.
4.) After I found where the carts were taken, finding out that the room the carts are in is not locked and the carts are not locked as well.

Number 4 is the thing that pisses me off the most. Its like you might as well put out a sign saying "STEAL ME".

I know why the carts weren't locked because it is apparently too damn hard to remember a 4 digit combo. The carts were moved to the insecure room because it is Just Too Damn Hard (tm) to do some morning prep before the little hellions come to abuse the laptops. It is kind of sad that I know why they do the things that they do but I can't do anything to stop them.

Well, I fixed part of the problem, I locked the carts. Fuck the door, I really doubt the door lock even worked as I have never seen that door locked ever. If something happens, it isn't my fault for I didn't put those carts there. I was really tempted to just take the cart back but fuck that as well.

I sense a phone call coming. "Something doesn't work, software XYZ doesn't start" or "What's the combo?".

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I cannot imagine your pain, and I work in a hotel with a consant stream of people that "just bought" their computers, people that are too stupid to live as coworkers, etc.

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

I worked at a school department for a while doing similiar.

Every so often I get nostalgic. Then I remember the "electro magenet" incident when a kid walked all the way around a 60 computer lab with electro magnet touching each of the CRT screens...
And got told "Well kids will be kids". They weren't happy when 50 of those monitors didn't degaus/demagnifie and they had to buy new ones.

[dark-fx.livejournal.com]

Uh, Electromagnetic coils are perfect for degaussing CRTs. Perhaps you meant he was walking around with a rather strong permanent magnet.

[dark-fx.livejournal.com]

whoops, false assumption that the e-mag was using an alternating current.

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

Nope. Battery. Science experiment gone wrong.

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

Electro magnet created in science class.

Electroc magnet dragged across glass on computers.

Computers have pretty, but not useful, rainbow streaks across them.

[dark-fx.livejournal.com]

Still, they probably would have been fixable with a degaussing coil. Basically just a real long loop of wire with a current limiter plugged into the wall.

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

Degausser was built into this model of monitor. Didn't do much if anything to fix the problem.

Have you ever worked for a school? Finances are even worse than companies. Getting them to pay for a spool of wire and a current limiter would have required months of "lowest bidder" talks, even with the total cost probably being in the 10s of dollars instead of hundreds. Getting the montiors was easy.

And this ladies and gentleman is where your tax money goes to.
But it's really people's fault, since you elect the idiots who put things like "low bid" requirements into work (or onto ballets, where you're even dumber for voting for it).

[dark-fx.livejournal.com]

The built ins generally aren't designed to degauss magnetism problems that were caused externally.

I have worked for a school district. There it would depend on the timing of the budget to be able to get stuff done.

[tregare.livejournal.com]

yup, the "pro" degaussing coils for TVs/monitors are seriously more powerful than the wimpy coils in the monitors themselves.

[mango-mouse.livejournal.com]

We had 11 laptops stolen from our office about a year ago. The individual(s) just walked right in and snagged as many as they could find just sitting around on people's desks.

Prior to that a lot of us IT folk were pushing for the purchase of laptop locks because not only would internal audit nick us on that, but it just made sense since all the execs just HAD to have the best laptops money could buy.

Well, after the little theft and the fact that we had to disclose it to the SEC, we got all the funding we needed for those locks!!