Today I’ve done the “school-run” since 10 AM, and it’s always frustrating. Basically, my co-worker is responsible for all the work that needs to be done to the different schools’ computers, and therefore this is mostly his problem. Unfortunately he’s on sick-leave for the following three weeks, so I have to take on his work. This includes all of the schools’ computer systems. The work isn’t very hard in itself, but it’s the pupils that makes it so annoying. In the Junior High, the pupils seem to have taken it as a personal goal to completely destroy ever computer.
For example, my co-worker replaced a CD-drive a couple of weeks ago because it wouldn’t shut. Upon examination we noticed that it was full of European 5 cents.
So, the reason why today was particularly frustrating. Yesterday I installed 7 new Dell desktop computers in the computer class. These we setup with mandatory profiles (basically it’s making Windows XP load a pre-configured profile for the pupil account on start-up so they can’t mess it up), and a small wrapper program for cmd.exe, which checked which user was trying to run it, and if it was the pupil it displayed a message box with “GAME OVER” and displayed a rickrolled.me site.
This was quite a smart move, as the site allows you to track how many persons you’ve “rickrolled”, which allowes us to see how many times the nasty little buggers have tried to run cmd.exe.
So, since 5 pm yesterday (or really 8 am today) until 1 pm today, 11 pupils have tried to run cmd.exe. And since the curriculum doesn’t contain anything about using the CLI or batch-files, I’m assuming that they were up to no good. Yesterday we found a batch-file in the pupils network-drive which was 12 MB big, line after line of “start”. If you figure that every start only takes up 5 bytes, and then add in formating, you’ll see how many lines we’re talking about here.
Anyhow, today I needed to check an error I made when installing the computers yesterday, so I went back. Today there was a class in session when I dropped by, so the teacher told some pupils to move aside so I could fix the computer (somehow I messed up when trying to update the mandatory profile to include a network drive and a short-cut to the drive). A normally behaved pupil would have moved aside and watched interestedly as I proceeded to fix the computer (as I did when I went to the same school 5-6 years ago =). But this egghead proceeded to hide the task bar (like that would stop me…) and then unplugged the keyboard. WHY? It’s not as if he made sure I wouldn’t be able to fix it, all I had to do was to plug in the keyboard, press Ctrl+Alt+Del, log off and log in again. Just plain old annoying…
Anyhow, now I’m going to do some more tweaking of this blog, look up the cost of a low profile firewire card, email that to the computer-class teacher at the Junior High, and then it’s coffee time!
Grumpy Techie 
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