This is a story about my job as head of IT in a small municipal office in Austria. It is is not the last story about that place, there are many to come.
A head
As head of IT, you not only manage all of the government instalments but also all schools and preschools. I have had the general experience that the higher the education, the more the teachers know their way around computers and smartphones. So, when one of the preschools called I was indeed worried that it would be about some stupid thing (oh, the stories I could tell). But no, they just wanted a video projector.
And so the quest to find a one for them started. Mind you, I was rather new to this job. I first started my adventure by visiting a colleague of mine who oversees the portable projectors we have for exactly such situations. I went over and asked for it – she answered the beamer was not there. It was, indeed, in use.
“What now?”, I asked myself. Well, we have a room filled to the brim with random IT stuff, so I thought I could find success there. I started searching through mountains of old things, at least twenty random monitors, about three thousand cables, and at least two hundred nasty keyboards. And then there it was. A huge cabinet full with at least twenty new-looking beamers. I struck gold.
I chose two, since I was not sure if they all worked and I figured one of them will. So I drive to the preschool, set up the beamer and begin trying to get an image. Although all buttons light up, no image is to be seen. Welp, good thing I got two. I try the second one, and same thing.
Ok, what now? I drive as fast as I legally can back to said room and test one beamer after the other; they all have the same problem. So, I keep on searching. There has to be one working somewhere. I stumble upon an old looking fossil, it looks like it was from 2010 and has had long years of abuse behind it. Thinking about how funny it would be if this one worked and the new ones didn’t I plug it in and, behold, a working projector! Only 720p, but who cares at this point. I rush back and the kids can finally watch their Christmas movie.
I go back and figure that there has to be something fishy if all of those projectors had the same problem. I open one up and, to my surprise, there is no lense. I open another one and find the same thing. Someone has removed every. Single. Lens. From every. Single. Beamer. So either I’ll find a stash of Lenses randomly in some corner or they have been sold at the cost of the children’s viewing experience.
This whole experience took half of my day and half of my hair. Next is an image to depict how much hair I’ll have left should this happen again.
Credit for the images:
Beamer: Image by seagul on pixabay
Bald Head: Image by OpenClipart-Vectors
Gold Chest: Image by OpenClipart-Vectors
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