![]() ![]() We could work ahead if we were fast enough, or even work from home, but at least half of us lived outside of town, so the options were dial-up or a very terrible 3mb/s wireless service that felt like they were leeching off AT&T's 3G towers and throttling down every time they got nervous someone might notice.īy the end of the first month more than half the class had dropped of the five or six of us that stayed I think only half actually passed the class. Our user accounts could install Firefox locally, but any changes would be undone at logout even if we used the same machine every day, we'd still have to waste 5-10 minutes of our 55-minute class period installing Firefox. So on the third or fourth day of the semester, after pretty much all of us complained to the office or our 'teacher' that we couldn't actually take our course, the IT guys came in at the beginning with a solution: "So you're gonna look in your network folder and there'll be an orange-and-blue icon called 'Firefox'."Īnd of course this didn't really solve the issue: all they gave us was an installer for Firefox, instead of installing it themselves. We all had network accounts with a decent amount of storage space, and had since at least as far back as '98-'99, so using the machines wasn't an issue, but following the directions for the online course proved impossible: the lecture videos wouldn't play at all on the horribly outdated version of IE installed on our machines. We got a box of ratty 99 cent headsets that likely never got cleaned and a bunch of turn-of-the-century Dells designed for Windows 98, somehow limping along with the rest of the network's XP upgrade (although trying to enable standard desktop features instead of Classic mode would basically render the machine unusable until reboot). Unfortunately, those were all in the main computer lab the dozen of us taking the course got stuck in the library's research/printing room. You want to hear a story about lazy school IT? It's a bit long-winded and there's no huge payoff, but I figure I might as well share.īack in my senior year of high school, our Advanced Math II class (basically an entry-level college trig/pre-calc class) got the dubious honor of being the pilot program for an online course system (our school's first, anyways seems like their provider had been around a few years already) as none of the teachers could really teach it in previous years students were technically under the supervision of the Advance Math I teacher in the same hour he taught that class (which was only one hour of the day as he was also the gym teacher - it wasn't a large school by any means), but after checking in for attendance they'd go off to the cafeteria and do self-study/group study with the guidance councilor or office aides checking in every once in a while.Īnyways, since a local computer reseller/ISP had donated a bunch of new machines a year or two prior, this didn't seem like such a bad deal.
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