Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Tech Purgatory Continues

In some ways, we've made progress at the office.  Two weeks ago, we arrived at the office to find we had no technology:  no phones, no computers, no e-mail, no server, no internet.  By the end of that first week of Tech Hell, we still had nothing, and when our tech person arrived with a mi fi hotspot device, it was a defective one.  That week, I drove back and forth to the office twice a day on most days--once to open the campus since I'm one of the few of us with all the keys, and then back to my home office, where I had working technology.

A week ago, we got the working mi fi, and for a few days, we could do some work out of our offices.  We finally got all of our e-mail passwords reset, so we could access current e-mail, but not past e-mail.  We had working phones by the end of the week.  It seemed that if we lugged our own equipment to the office, we'd be back to normal-ish.

Of course, we still don't have a good way to print from our laptops.  If the document can be transformed into a PDF, we can save it onto a USB drive, take the USB to the printer, and print that way.  But not everything can be transformed that way.  Grr.

Yesterday, we figured out how the library assistant could bring her laptop to campus and how we could keep the laptop safe; the library is much too open to leave it out in the open.  We looked at the available offices, and she chose one to work in.  She went home to get her laptop so that she could spend the afternoon cataloguing.  She returned and got set up.

You know where this is headed, don't you?  The mi fi device went out at 11:30, and when I left in the late afternoon, it was still out.  The library assistant took her laptop and went back home to catalog.  I stayed to be the person in charge of the mostly empty campus.  I have a lot of my books for my seminary classes on campus, so I have now read ahead.  I wrote the first essay that's due Sept. 8, a 3 page spiritual journey kind of essay.  I answered the phones, which were still working.

I have no idea what to expect today.  We did discover, by way of someone's smart phone, that our mi fi provider was having issues as of 8:30 yesterday morning.  Will they be resolved today?  Who knows.  I've downloaded the additional materials from my seminary course shells, so if I need to spend a day reading, I'm prepared.

What a strange month it's been with all sorts of issues that I never anticipated would be part of my working life.  Here's hoping that it gets sorted out in September.

No comments: