What exactly it is they want me there to do, I've been largely left to figure out on my own. Get the iPads in the hands of the staff and GarageBand students; that one was clear. But I've been left to set my own direction for much of what I do.
I have very little tolerance for piles of unused stuff. I have even lower tolerance for piles of unused and dated electronics piled in storage rooms and hallways. So, I've been taking advantage of this start up time, when things are still relatively slow, and getting things cleaned up. Last week was especially quiet because the school was on spring break, and there were only about ten people in the building.
Joe helped haul stuff up from the basement into what will be a new technology classroom and sorted it into usable / not piles when he was home on break in mid-March. Last week I took time to test the PCs in the usable equipment pile to see if they'd actually come up. It was a more exciting exercise than I'd thought it would be - about one in four blew its power supply when I plugged it in. Even when I was expecting the crackle as I started to plug the boxes in, it still made me jump. (You all DO know that machines run on smoke, don't you? Once you let the smoke out, they don't work any more. -- wisdom courtesy of my dad.)
The company one of the students works for offered to take everything we didn't want off our hands. The building manager hauled it all over there. He dislikes piles of stuff as much or more than I do and is my new best friend because I got it sorted out so he could clear it out.
The end result is a good ten truckloads of old equipment hauled out of the building for recycle / reuse, thirty-some PCs that will be usable once they get an operating system and Open Office installed on them (these will be offered to staff and students to take home), and about sixty usable flat-screen monitors (ditto).
** dusts off hands ** Feels good to have most of it cleaned up! (sadly, there's still one storage room left to go - I ran out of time...)
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