So that’s where that went

After removing a projector this week that had finally packed up after 8 years, I discovered the final resting place of a long-lost Allen key:

It was jammed into one of the adjustment bolts, and needed a percussive maintenance tool to remove it. Clearly the original installers didn’t have one with them.

WE NEVER CLOSE

While diagnosing a sound problem in one of our classrooms, the teacher mentioned to me that her computer (less than a year old) was “a bit slow sometimes”.

When I checked it, she had 39 PowerPoints, 61 Word documents, and 28 browser tabs open.

How to confuse your cover teachers

I recently installed these into the languages classrooms of our school:

This makes it a lot easier to produce accents, cédilles, and other diacritics. Our languages teachers, who are both French, love them.

The cover teachers… not so much.

Yes/No/What was the question again?

In today’s edition of “Stupid Error Messages from Exchange”, we have this gem of idiocy from the Exchange 2010 Management Console:

Yes, Yes to All, No or Cancel. But… Yes to what? Am I saying, “yes, I want to continue,” or perhaps, “yes, I agree that is a silly idea so don’t continue?” Am I suddenly in the middle of an MCSE exam and have to decide whether this is the expected behaviour or not?

ASK ME A BLOODY QUESTION IF YOU WANT A YES/NO ANSWER.

The Case of the Disappearing Start Menu

I was summoned urgently to one of the admin offices to deal with a mysterious problem – every time the user clicked on a menu, it would open, then immediately vanish again.

I walked in, and lo and behold, she could demonstrate the problem perfectly.

“Look, I can click on Start, and it pops up for a second, then disappears! I can’t do any work!”

Restraining myself from commenting on how giddy she must be at actually having an excuse to be in her normal state of ‘not doing any work’, I quickly ascertained the cause of the problem. Leaning over the bomb site that passes for a desk in these parts, I gingerly lifted the pile of class registers off of the top-left corner of the keyboard, releasing the Esc key that was being held down and cancelling out of every menu.

If only they were all that easy…

Friends Reunited are lying about ‘deleting’ your account

Back before Facebook, Friends Reunited was a nascent social networking/school reunion site that was quite popular in the UK. It recently relaunched, and emailed all its old users to let them know.

I was one of them, and this reminded me that I should go back and delete my account, since I have no intention of using the service.

Once I had logged myself in (astonishingly, I still remembered my password), I found that the option to remove my account was actually pretty easy to find, and was quite clear that it would be a permanent deletion:

“This will permanently delete your account,” it states (the red emphasis is mine). That’s pretty unequivocal, and not exactly open to interpretation.

It is also completely untrue.

Screw it

Along with the near-certainty of personal injury and loss of fixings that comes with server racking, there is one absolutely immutable law of rack installation:

Any package of more than 8 cage nuts will include at least one that has no threading.

(and you won’t notice until you’re trying to put the final screw into the switch you’ve just racked up).

How many teachers does it take to turn on a projector?

Question: How many teachers does it take to turn on a projector?

Answer: Three.

• One to claim it’s broken when they try to get their presentation working 2 minutes after assembly starts,
• one to send a student to fetch the technician, and
• one to tell the technician that they’ve now found the remote as soon as he arrives.

No regrets

This morning I was wondering whether to take pity on a student who currently has a computer ban for printing out filth in one of the IT labs last week (he claims somebody else used his account, naturally).

Then I discovered that one of our hall projector computers needs a rebuild after someone unplugged the power while it was halfway through updates on Friday afternoon, and that 2 of our senior lab machines wouldn’t log in because some helpful little turd had pulled the network cables out.

Now I’m wondering whether some way of setting offenders on fire when they log in would be considered unreasonable.

No more spreadsheets. Long live spread sheets!

Really, Microsoft? This is a spelling mistake? The dictionary term that you use on your own website to describe the function of Excel is marked as a spelling mistake?

Yes, we’ve been here before with the grammar checker. But this is just depressing.