What a horrible day - of computers and illness..

Well, that was a horrible day just over.

It started out well enough, with a pleasant morning spent enjoying having Foundation in the ICT suite again and trying to get them to grasp the vagaries of positional time (today, tomorrow, yesterday etc).

Then, within a few minutes it all fell apart.

The SIMs registration modules decided to crash in half of the classrooms.
This is the software that was installed across the network to let the staff register the class electronically. Today was the first major update of the software. The idea is that the main update downloads to the main server, then to the admin server and then out to the class SIMs computers. In theory it should all go smoothly.
But theory rarely holds up in these cases.
Half the machines updated fine. half crashed or simply lost the SIMs program. It didn't help that a couple of staff opened SIMs, saw the update screen and decided to close it and log out midway through. Teachers. Always telling the children to listen and to read instructions. Never ever doing it themselves.
So we rang up the schools ICT people and they tell us that it's a known problem and has been happening all over.
Worse than this, I had a look on the EduGeek site tonight and it seems this is a regular event with SIMs updates across a network.

So, as it stands half the SIMs network is down.
And I may not get around to fixing it tomorrow either, because .....

Whilst all of this was going on Molly's school rang up to tell us she wasn't well. I'd sent her to school this morning complaining that she was tired and cold. But I did what we usually do, dosed her up with Calpol and packed her off to lessons. Half one and it's her school on he phone. She's not been right all morning and is complaining that she's feeling poorly, with a headache and feeling all hot and cold.

When I got to school a little later she was obviously not well and had that horrible hang dog, lifeless look that a genuinely ill child has. So we went home, lay on the sofa, had ice-cream, watched The Golden Compass and generally did all of those things that you do when children are ill. Her temperature was way up, yet she complained still of feeling cold. Maybe it was a 24hour viral thing or could it just be that she'd caught the sun really badly and was suffering from some sort of heatstroke?
Once Louise came home it was tea and bed very quickly as Molly was obviously just out on her feet.
Then we did that horrible thing that we do every time she's ill. Waited for her fever to break. Kept checking her temperature and breathed a sigh of relief when she stopped radiating heat like a small furnace. As she is now, it's been a rough night and it's always a worry when she's ill. But hopefully she'll be okay to go into school tomorrow. Because, with terrible timing, tomorrow is her school trip and she's desperate to make it.
Fingers crossed for us both.