Boxes and Wires and Well Intended Users

This has been a week from HECK for me professionally. First off, I wear many hats at my job. My responsibilities consist of:

• network administrator
• desktop support
• SIS/Gradebook administrator
• webmaster
  
• technology teacher for middle school
• administrative technology planning
• budgeting and purchasing
• training (and re-training...and re-training)
  
• instructional technology
• professional development
• manual labor when needed (I am one of a small handful of males on staff..go figure)
• fixing anything that plugs into a wall socket

Now, I LOVE my job. I have lots of autonomy in our small pond (700 student parochial school). I receive good support from our administrators and I have a say in the direction of instructional technology in our school. But with the breadth of my job, sometimes there isn't a lot of depth. I'm a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none kind of guy. That said, when something goes wrong technically, it is a major ordeal because it takes me away from the rest of my duties.

Enter the well-intentioned person who knows enough about technology to get them into trouble, but not enough to get them out of trouble (or even realize they are IN trouble). On Monday, I was sitting down to enjoy my lunch of beef macaroni, green beans and canned mixed fruit (Mmmmm!) when our assistant principal came to me and said that the network was down. Oy I said, slurped down the remainder of my lunch and headed to the server room (I always go there first). Yep, the network was being flaky... sporadic Internet access and network file services, half our network printers wouldn't work. After I poked around, I decided it wasn't a server issue but probably an issue with one of our switches. Our MDF looks a lot like this:

The really Ha-Ha but not in a funny way moment came when I realized that the patch panels were not marked correctly (installed prior to me coming on board). Trying to identify the issue ended up taking two days. I did discover which port was causing the problem, but not where that port led to in the school! I did unplug the cable from the patch panel (and the network magically came back to life) and decided to wait until someone called me to say their computer didn't work. Well, the next day that happened. I went to the classroom and yes, there was no connection. Bingo, found the right room. I then discovered that the teacher, because one of her student computers wasn't working, unplugged the cable from the back of one of the computers (the other end plugged into a small hub) and plugged it into an empty port on said hub thereby creating a loop on the hub. Now, as said before, the depth of my knowledge is not great in any one area so I can't explain the technical reason but this one little loop crashed our entire network. I asked the teacher if anyone had been messing with the wires and she stated that she had because one of the computers wasn't working. Oy again! She thought that randomly unplugging network cables would magically fix the issue. Double Oy! Needless to say, I reminded her that I get paid to fix problems and if she experienced issues, she should call me and I would happily come down and fix it.

Lessons for me...

1. Never assume certain levels of knowledge of your users
2. Always make sure you overstate directions and what not to do, even if it may sound patronizing
3. Make sure all your patch panels are properly marked so you can identify problems quickly
4. Take a deep breath!

OK, rant done.

Tags: ed tech, john maklary, technology, education