How I Spent My Day

It should have been an easy day.

I had 6 straight hours of classes, no prep period today.  Three 2-hr classes of statistics.  I had a "lab" scheduled, an educational but mildly entertaining activity that should keep the students occupied for most of that time.  That would free me up to catch up on some grading and other work.

It wasn't meant to be.

I have some HP Mini netbooks, one for every two students.  The lab required going to a couple of web sites and running some probability simulations (Plinko and a Monty Hall sim), as well as some other tasks.  It shouldn't have been a big deal.

But I spent a large portion of those 6 hrs diagnosing and trying to fix computer and wifi connectivity issues.  (District officials are baffled by, but freely admit, the fact that my school inexplicably has the worst wifi in the district, despite all the access nodes we have.)  After 5 or 6 computers connected, no one else could.  Some computers came up with a warning that I couldn't proceed because the copy of Windows installed was counterfeit (all the computers were imaged from the same master image, and all of them have the Windows sticker right on the computer).

I contacted our Tech Services people.  They had me try some things.  That took more time.  It didn't do anything to help with our connectivity issue, but it did get rid of the "counterfeit Windows" problem.  The two computers that still have problems, though?  "Go to this web site and fill out a report with as much detail as possible about the computers, and then go to that web site and schedule a time for you to bring the computers to us to look at."  Great, thanks for that help.

I wrote in a previous post how I'm being required to turn in my perfectly good desktop computer for a laptop I don't want.  BTW, these laptops don't have a CD drive, don't have an ethernet port, and don't have a number pad.  Anyway, I read the 2 pages of instructions about how to back up all the data on my computer so I can take it to Tech Services and trade it in for the unwanted laptop--but the instructions weren't accurate.  And I followed the simplest backup instructions, backing up to a flash drive!  The "users" folder, which should hold all my files no matter where I stored them on the computer, was not where they said it was.  An email exchange allowed me to get to that folder, but moving it to my flash drive resulted in only 4 files being transferred.  "Is your flash drive big enough?"  Yes, it's a 16GB flash drive and I was only trying to move 1GB of data.  "Try moving the sub-folders individually instead of all at once."  This email exchange wasn't doing much for my blood pressure.  And why wasn't the instruction sheet right in the first place?

I'm a teacher.  I don't ask the Tech Services people to teach probability, they shouldn't expect me to do all this computer work.  And it's not like I'm a computer illiterate, but I certainly don't have all the access and permissions and such that they do, barriers that are supposed to keep kids from looking at boobies on school computers or something.  It's just not a good use of my time to do all this computer work.  It's not my area of expertise.

Here's the bigger problem.

My district looks at money and nothing else.  It didn't cost any money to have me work on those computer problems all day.  Oh, there's certainly an opportunity cost, and I'm the one who paid it in work that didn't get done, but there was no dollar cost--I was going to get paid today no matter what I did, and so were the Tech Services people.  The inefficiency of wasting my time the way I had to today doesn't show up on anyone's spreadsheet, so to district people, there's no problem here.  And if there's no problem, there's no solution needed.

Penny wise, and pound foolish.  Just like buying laptops without ethernet ports, number pads, or CD drives, and then expecting the schools themselves to buy the needed peripherals.  But hey, the district got a good deal on the computers, right?

Ugh.  I'll close with a paraphrase of how I ended one of those email conversations today.  "I'm entirely too frustrated now.  I'll stop here and get frustrated again tomorrow."