Loop de Loop

Every year we are instructed to unplug and pack away all of our technology goodies. We can take our computers home over the summer (all teachers have laptops) which is handy if you're doing some in-service work over break. However, everything else, including phones, hubs, printers, document readers, etc. are safely tucked away. Being the slightly paranoid type, and not trusting my memory after a summer of heat and wine spritzers, I obsessively label everything I unplug so it's simply a matter of putting all the pieces together when I return.

However, a few years ago someone in the building in an attempt to get all of his or her technology hooked up, managed to create a loopback. This loopback basically shut down our entire phone and computer system for two days until the techy people from District located it and fixed it.

Not having phones and computers on the first day of school is, as you can imagine, a nightmare. Guidance was having new kids enrolling all day and basically was just putting them in rooms to have a place to hold them until they could get the computer problem fixed and schedule them.

So, one of the Powers That Be at District declared that no one was to hook up any technology. Instead, they would be sending techy people in to each building to get us all set up. No problem because we teachers have a lot of other things to do to get ready and having someone set up all our technology sounded like a great idea.

Except they didn't show up until yesterday afternoon.

In the meantime, we're all having meltdowns because we need to print out and copy things like team rules, parent letters, and all the massive amount of paperwork we hand out to our darlings on the first day. And when they showed up they weren't the techy people from District. Instead they were college kids hired as temps from the local University.

So what do you think happened?

Yup, you got it. They created a loopback.

*snort*

So this morning, while The Principal covered her ears and went "La, la, la, la", the Guidance Goober, who's also our techno dweeb, told us to just hook our stuff up if we knew what we were doing, and help those that didn't. So I got up and running, and got Mrs. Math up and running, and everyone was good to go.

At least the techy college kids did come by to see if I needed any help. Poor things, they tried, but trying to figure out our network is like eating spaghetti with a spoon!