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…