Dear software support manager

I asked you if your software is based on another product we use, and therefore whether it might interfere with the one we already have.

You assured me it wasn’t based on the other software; that it was developed entirely in-house.

Today, quite by chance, I happened upon conclusive evidence that it is based on that first piece of software.

I have therefore determined that you fall into one of the following categories:

1. An incompetent retard who doesn’t know the first thing about the product you manage the support for.
2. A lying scumbag.

Please pick the one which applies to you, and send me the answer on the back of a £50 note to the usual address.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

How to be a Favourite – #1: Ask us for easy things

You probably all know someone who seems to get the things they ask for from IT more quickly than you. Chances are, they are a Favourite. Today we discuss the first method of attaining this elusive property.

1. Ask us for easy things

It’s not that complicated, really. If the things you ask for are easy for us to do, we are less likely to groan when your name pops up on an incoming support request than if you always ask for things that take us hours of pain and misery to achieve.

Although this is perhaps the simplest method, it’s also one you won’t have much control over. Sometimes you’ll need things doing that are hard – just try to make sure they are not always so.

In the industry, this is known as ‘passive cooling’

Computers generate a fair bit of heat; a significant portion of their power usage is wasted not only in excess heat (primarily from the CPU), but additional power to drive fans intended to help keep them from catching fire.

During the holidays, the site team helpfully give us a hand keeping the computers cool. They turn off the school’s heating.

I get that heating the entire school for a handful of people is wasteful. It doesn’t make wandering the school in 3 layers and a hat any less irritating. Two winters ago it was so bad that not only had I taken to wearing a ski jacket in the IT labs, but we had to abandon our normal offices and retreat to an office in the middle of the school which has few outside walls.

This week marks the beginning of the first real cold snap, and so far our new office is proving fairly well insulated. Nonetheless, my typing is getting slower from the cold and I’ve broken out the electric heater.

You couldn’t make it up

Today MrsRobinson made a sudden holiday appearance in our office. The first thing she did was accuse LadiesMan of slacking off and looking at porn.

I asked her why she’d come in.

She wanted some colour laser printing.

I honestly hadn’t expected yesterday’s post to be quite so prophetical, but nonetheless, I couldn’t have proved my point better.

MrsRobinson

MrsRobinson is part teacher, part admin manager. We shared an office for nearly 3 years and have become firm friends as a result, thanks in no small part to the fact she has a somewhat salacious and wicked sense of humour. That particular trait is of course always popular amongst the younger men on the staff, and given that she has an adult child of her own, has led recently to me insinuating that she is something of a ‘Mrs Robinson’ character.

I’m quite certain she will try to strangle me once she sees it here in writing.

Half term

In some schools, IT staff get the holidays off just like the teachers. We don’t.

For us, the half-term break is usually a catch-up week. It’s when we can get on with all the real work we’ve not been able to do since the start of term because we’re being interrupted every five minutes by some grubby 12-year-old who’s forgotten his password again.

Of course, if a teacher does somehow find their way onto the site during the break (usually because they want to waste the school’s money printing out their 20-page travel plans, instead of doing it at home), they will almost certainly express surprise that we are not at the pub and accuse us of sitting around browsing Facebook, or reading lolcat sites, or posting to our blogs.

How not to vandalise Wikipedia

If you’re a behaviourally challenged child thinking of vandalising a Wikipedia page, here’s a list of simple tips to follow if you’re planning on getting away with it:

1. Don’t do it from the laptop you bought through the school that is instantly traceable to you.
2. Don’t do it during a lesson.
3. Especially not on the page about the very thing you are being taught in that lesson.
4. Especially not when the person giving that lesson is an Assistant Headteacher.

You MUPPET.

Dear educational software suppliers

If you will insist on publishing software so poorly designed that even the setup program cannot be run from a network share, would you please be so kind as to stop selling it to institutions where client-server networks are now the norm.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Favourites

Any IT technician who tells you they don’t succumb to favouritism is lying.

We all have our favourites; people who we are happier to help than the next person. Note that this is subtly different from people who get the most help from us. Some people get better service because it would be stupid for us not to do so: when The Head raises a support ticket, we snap to it, because he’s the man in charge and if we piss him off by keeping him waiting it affects our job prospects.

Some people we help more because they are bona fide friends, rather than professional acquaintances (and that’s probably true of anyone).

Our favourites, however, are the people we want to help regardless of their seniority or whether we will actually get anything out of it.

You probably all know someone who seems to get the things they ask for from IT more quickly than you. Chances are, they are a Favourite. “Oh Angry Technician, how do I become your Favourite?” I hear you cry. Well, I’m glad you asked, because over the coming weeks I’ll be detailing some tried-and-tested methods for ensuring that you too can win the favour of your IT technician, and enjoy stress-free service from them in future.

Stay tuned for the secrets of better living with your IT team…

This is why we don’t muck around in classrooms, kids

Hey, kids! You know how your teacher always tells you not to run around like a moron in the classroom? OK, maybe they don’t use those exact words (at least not out loud), but here’s why:

This is what a shattered laptop screen looks like. I know I’m already risking this turning into the Daily Laptop Destruction blog, but we actually first saw this one last week, and luckily (for us) it’s not school equipment. This was the baby of some poor sap in the sixth form, and had its screen accidentally smashed by another student following a bout of buffoonery in a classroom.