Fiddlers elbow
It's been a couple of weeks since I have felt the urge to write, but I needed to document my latest time-wasting escapades.
I persuaded the HOD (yes he who is stepping down) to splash out on a new communal computer for the student office. He agreed, providing that I got the best quote, and set the computer up. "Fine" I thought, it shouldn't take longer than an hour. After all Macs are supposed to be easy to set up. All I needed was to fill out a couple of forms; one for software, and one to get the computer connected to the network, then pop over to the computing centre.
Today after a mindnumbing 6 hours, I finally did it. I won't go into the tedious detail, but briefly (or not as the case may be) this task required 5 trips to the computer centre, 4 phone calls, talking to 2 different computer assistants, 4 forms, removal of 3 shelving brackets (the computer didn't fit!, 4 signatures, 4 CDs and a partridge in a pear tree.
Experiments performed - zero.
Grants written- zero.
Papers read- zero.
Lectures prepared- zero.
Emails read- 10
Emails written - 4
Swear words- n where n is a number between 20 and 100.
The reward for my endeavour? One of the students told it was fantastic that they could play songs from someone else's Itunes library! A former boss told me that buying someone a computer never made them more productive. I am turning into that man.
I persuaded the HOD (yes he who is stepping down) to splash out on a new communal computer for the student office. He agreed, providing that I got the best quote, and set the computer up. "Fine" I thought, it shouldn't take longer than an hour. After all Macs are supposed to be easy to set up. All I needed was to fill out a couple of forms; one for software, and one to get the computer connected to the network, then pop over to the computing centre.
Today after a mindnumbing 6 hours, I finally did it. I won't go into the tedious detail, but briefly (or not as the case may be) this task required 5 trips to the computer centre, 4 phone calls, talking to 2 different computer assistants, 4 forms, removal of 3 shelving brackets (the computer didn't fit!, 4 signatures, 4 CDs and a partridge in a pear tree.
Experiments performed - zero.
Grants written- zero.
Papers read- zero.
Lectures prepared- zero.
Emails read- 10
Emails written - 4
Swear words- n where n is a number between 20 and 100.
The reward for my endeavour? One of the students told it was fantastic that they could play songs from someone else's Itunes library! A former boss told me that buying someone a computer never made them more productive. I am turning into that man.
posted by Professor Xavier at 10:16 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home