(no subject)

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

My office is located at the back of a classroom. You have to go through the classroom to get to me. As you exit my office, there are computers everywhere, neatly arranged in rows. This morning, I discovered that the second computer in the row nearest my door has had the RAM nicked. I was in my office all day yesterday. Nicking RAM while I'm actually in my office takes bottle. (It's a Compaq PC, it's stupidly easy to pull the front off of the computer and nick stuff)

This is in addition to the two computers from another classroom that we discovered yesterday had had the cases unscrewed, the RAM stolen, and the cases screwed back on*. One of our students is wandering round with a screwdriver. Oh joy. And we suspect a similar thing has happened in yet another classroom where 10 machines that should have 256meg are only reporting 128.

Also, I have a filthy headache. And I'm fed up with teachers asking me to pirate them software. I don't mind piracy at home, but I'm buggered if I'm doing it when there's a chance the school will be prosecuted for it. I like my job.

*The classroom concerned is available for use outside of lesson times for the 6th formers (17/18 year olds) to use for their coursework. None of the others are. I spoke to my Director of IT about it yesterday morning, and we agreed that the room would be taken out of use for anything other than timetabled lessons. Until the main IT teacher came in and said we should give the kids another chance. The stupidity of the woman amazes me.

Comments

[xdownfornowx.livejournal.com]

What's the point of steal 10 sticks of 128? Not much money to be made there. Worse yet, why leave any ram at all? A roommate of mine used to steal memory out of apple IIs back in grade school when he and his friends didn't want to do anything in class. I think it was a foriegn language class. Computers don't work, you do nothing in class. You might want to install web cams in the classrooms... inexpensive security.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Then again, our office was having rampant stealing of the 128s, either to be pocketed for whatever purpose or to be cannibalized into their own machines. Asking for at least two web browser sessions open at all times, others as necessary, Outlook, and IMs on Win2k is way too much for 128 to handle, and we knew this.

The outright stealing possibility I might have understood if someone had like a dual processor P3 board that had like 8 RAM slots - this would have turned into a cool gig of memory on it. Or... just plain out of spite. There's a lot of people with no love lost for them, or the goons that have to do the repairs.

Kids may be kids, but this is what makes me think adults will be kids also.

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

We had webcams, until one of the stupid teachers left them lying around. 20 webcams (which didn't even belong to the school!) disappeared very quickly...

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

i remember playing Doom with a friend of mine, back when it came out, on the school pc's which were 486/25's with 4 meg ram.

However, Rise of the Triad required 8 meg. So we popped open the case of the machine next to us, pulled the 4 meg ram stick from it, and put it in the machine we were using.

Computer teacher came in the classroom while we were in the process of ram swapping, asked what we were doing. Explained, and he said something to the effect of making sure we put it back in the other machine when we're done.

I kinda miss high school, I was given free reign of the place :)

Hell, at one point I was given the master key for the school for a job I was working on there, and then they forgot to ask for it back, i finally turned it back in about 6 months later.

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

See, as much as them installing games on the machines pisses me off, if they were taking the RAM for a reason rather than just the hell of it, it'd be more understandable. But we lose some RAM every single week. Except during the holidays. I wish there were more of those...

[oggsmith.livejournal.com]

at the school i work at we shut down the lab for a while when stuff started coming up missing. we put messages in the bulletin stating that if the items werent returned that no one would be able to used the lab for the duration of the school year. sure enough after about a week or so anonomously in my box were the stolen items.

these kids see the stuff and think hey free upgrades woohoo but they don't think of the consequences to the rest of thier little buddies.

my responce to teachers asking me to install software of any kind is do you have the license for that software? they inevitably say no and want to know if the school has extra licenses to which i say no and walk away. some of them are ballsy enough to question me again about the software and i just don't respond.

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

I'd love to be able to close all the IT rooms for a few days, we'd never get away with it though :(

[catfewd.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear you are not having a great time at work.

Students are basically bored as hell and start to abuse PCs like nicking ram etc.

I remember in my college days, it was all about software, getting access to the 'read-only' hard drive ;), crashing a few machines etc.

Ah, those were the days.

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

Oh they do that too. And break the buttons off the mice (we have to replace 50 every 6 weeks or so. We've only got 400 machines!) And rearranging the letters on the keyboards to say imaginative things like "wanker". And rip the network ports off the wall. Blasted kids. The school would be so much nicer without them :)

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest something like locking the cases, or putting one of those really tiny BUT EXTREMELY LOUD (and moderately inexpensive) motion-alarms in them if locking isn't an option. That'll teach the little wankers. Failing that, just take the remaining ram from the computers, and double it up on half of them. Declare the half without ram out of order, and tell the students they can thank their idiot little friends for it. ;) Peer pressure will take over from there. Hell, screw it, just yank the ram from half the computers and lock it up. Give same excuse. Peer pressure again, only with computers that suck 50% more! Kids are so easily manipulated, because they think they know everything, when only 2% of them actually do. AND MANIPULATE THE REST. So, [EOL]