State of the me, Easter 2008 - part 2.

The Job.

I love the job, it's everything I wanted to do. Working in a primary school is incredibly rewarding and every day gives me so much enjoyment that I just couldn't imagine doing anything else.

But there are moments in the job when I have reason to think back many years to when I was working at Lordswood Girls Secondary in Birmingham. I was science technician there and bloody good at it. I'd advanced to the stage where the job took care of itself and there was very little reason to be stressed out about it. Of course, the management team at the school seemed to spend the entire time looking for new and interesting ways to fuck over the staff, which was where all the stress of the job came from.

Anyway, at some point a few years into the job our ICT technician left and they were trying to work out what to do about it. I was as much of a computer bod there as I always have been and knew my way around the basics. So they offered me the job. I politely turned it down giving as my main reason the love of being a good science techy and a lack of confidence in my abilities to do the ict job.
What I didn't say was what I'd told the outgoing ict technician; that I thought being an ict technician in a secondary school is a completely impossible job. The demands put upon the ict technician are never ending, there is never a stable position and the jobs never really end. Something is always needing fixing, something is always obselete, something is always wrong.

Which is exactly what I think of when I worry about the ict job at the primary school. My basic problem is that I know enough to get by but not enough to convince myself of that. When I was hired the head made it quite clear that my role was primarily to work with the pupils on ict. The whole technician side of it was a distant secondary priority. And it was with great pleasure that the last time the head walked through the ict suite with visitors she introduced me as the ict technician and teaching assistant.
So I know I'm doing the job that she wants me to and from the feedback I get from her and the staff I think I'm doing it well.

But still, at the back of my mind is the feeling of what if? What if something goes wrong? What if I'm needed to do more networky stuff than I'm capable of doing? Will the head be as understanding when I tell her I can't do it and we need to get people in at a few hundred quid a day to sort the network out?

Again, as with the house, much of this is ridiculous and merely my worries getting the better of me.