Last day at school, dressing up, dancing, computers failing, christmas cancelled?not this year! holidays are here!

Today was the final day at school.

The plan was simple:
Get in at 9-ish. Get changed into dress and full make up for staff performance. Practice dances.
09:30-10:45 Staff performance.
10:45-1:00 Tidy up, sort out a bit of paperwork, dismantle Christmas tree, generally share in the Christmas spirit thing going on, say merry christmas to all the children. Go home and relax.

Didn't quite work out like that.
I'll get to the performance in a little while, but shortly after it finished I was told our Internet connection had gone down.
Cross fingers and leave it for a while, hope it's an East Riding ICT problem, log an error call and wait for the ringback.
Network was fine though. Until that started going wrong as well.
Oh shit. Not how I imagined the final day at all.
Many phone calls and a mounting sense of panic.
Eventually we sort out a mini temporary fix that sorts out the network but not the Internet and we arrange for engineers to come in after the holidays to fix it.

By this time I'm feeling thoroughly un-Christmassy. This is the bit of the job I hate. The fact that it's me that is meant to be the one to sort all of these problems. I know, deep down, that in actual fact it's not really expected of me. The old ICT technician got people in to do various network things where necessary, she was a lot better at networks than I am, but wasn't afraid of getting people in to help when she needed.
But this is me we're talking about here. It's my job, I love doing it and I feel the need to be constantly doing it well. Stupidly, to me, the concept of doing it well seems to consist of never, ever getting anything wrong, never failing at anything and always being able to sort the damn thing out.
Which is why, by 2pm I was ready to go home and spend Christmas worrying about the network. But luckily for me, I didn't head home. I tried a couple of things that I'd learnt. And amazingly, they worked.
It took me until 3 to get all the computers sorted, but by this stage I was in full Christmas mode again. Unfortunately I didn't get to spend as much time enjoying the Christmas spirit as I'd initially hoped, but it was enough.

And the day started off so wonderfully well.....
The staff Christmas concert was, thank god, a huge success. All of the children absolutely loved it. But then again, what could be funnier to a 4-11 year old than seeing their teachers dressing up and dancing like loons?
All the worries of the night before over the line dancing moves evaporated when we all got out onto the floor, took our places and gave a very spirited, enjoyable, but not terrible accurate rendition of the dance.
(To paraphrase Eric Morecombe: All the right steps, but not necessarily in the right order.)
And what did I look like?

I was going for a trampy Audrey Hepburn does Christmas type look......


Maybe not. But fun anyway.