Work & Birthday

Today it was my birthday.
I am old. And infirm.
To celebrate I decided to start work after 75 days off.
In retrospect not the greatest way to celebrate a birthday.

The job is in a local primary school, doing ICT technician job covering for the ICT technician who's on maternity leave.
The school has about 15 networked classroom computers and an ICT suite of another 15. Luckily the ICT technician who's off on maternity seems to know what she was doing, because it's a very professional network setup which will hopefully prove to be extremely resiliant and wont break while I'm looking after it.
Now we've all taken a great leap of faith here, particularly the head and the ICT co-ordinator who employed me, because my networking skills aren't that great.
(As in, "George Bush jr isn't that great a president")
But they seem to want an ICT technician who can help out the teaching staff with ICT generally (which I can do)
and someone to be a teaching assistant in ICT for the kids
(which is what I wanted to do anyway).

Obviously it's crap money, because all education stuff is. And I'm only working 9-3:15 so I can still drop Molly at school and pick her up, so money continues to be tight, but hopefully I wont be too wiped out by it.
Although after today, I'm really not that sure.

Okay, it's the first day of a new job, which is stressful enough anyway, but I'm completely emotionally and physically wiped out.
And today was a training day, with no kids.

Got there at 9, after waving wife and child goodbye at 8:52.
It's very local as you can tell. Which is good because from tomorrow I'm having to really push it to get there on time. Have to walk Molly to school, dash back home, jump in the car and drive the 5 miles or so down the A1079 (proper Yorkshire folks like us refer to it as the ten-seventy-nine).

Started with a quick staff meeting. Lots of names passed my memory and then disappeared.
Then off to the ICT suite. Had a quick look at the machines and the room.
Then the problems started coming in. Now having worked in secondary schools with ICT technicians before I know how difficult the job is, with most teachers just about able to open up their free laptops but not knowing which button switches it on.
It seems that primary teachers are a little better but still manage to fuck up anything they touch. So today was fucked-up printer day. 4 different printer problems. Lots of time spent resetting, re-aligning and re-filling inks. My favourite is the one that someone's obviously yanked paper out of and knackered the feed. It now only feeds paper if one side is propped up at a 20 degree angle. (That's in the bin as soon as I work out who to talk to about ordering new stuff.)

The actual place itself is a mess as well, with loads of discs, cds, manuals, computer bits and pieces and other weird stuff floating around the room. Now those who know me will realise this is already pissing off the obsessively tidy me.

The main problem is just the feeling of being a little adrift and not knowing what the hell I'm doing. Which I know is perfectly normal in new jobs, but even more so in this job where certain of the important things (the network and networking stuff in general I really don't know what the hell I'm doing).

Tomorrow the kids arrive. First thing I'm supporting year 1. No idea what I'm doing, but at least they're not likely to be downloading porn and deleting most of the software on the network like the kids at Smiths Wood used to try and do.

The best thing about today - being welcomed home like the conquering hero by Louise and particularly Molly. Barely had chance to sit down before I was bombarded by presents and then a delicious cake that Molly made for me.
(I would have pictures but I was too tired to go upstairs and get the camera so I just concentrated on eating it instead).

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me.......