The school Summer holidays are coming. Where I work it’s just over two weeks before the school breaks up, and I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet that comes with it. One of the (many) jobs that’s due to happen over the holidays is the replacement of the computers that staff use in their form rooms. After having many delayed attempts at getting this authorised, we were finally given the go-ahead to order the devices. I placed the order with the suppliers, let them know when would be the best time in the holidays for them to be delivered, and then waited for everything to fall into place.
Only it didn’t quite (as usual). Around 11:50 one of the receptionists called our office and said that there was a lorry here with a delivery for us. Partially hesitant, we went up to see the driver and what exactly the delivery was. There was only one thing that we could think would need a lorry, and we weren’t disappointed. Sitting at the back of the lorry were 2 pallets. One with computers, and the other containing monitors. Oh dear.
There isn’t much storage room in the school, and having to find space for this unexpected equipment wasn’t something that was planned. Luckily there is a room that (despite the head teachers best efforts) is considered a temporary “storage room”. However, while there is a level surface leading to this room, there is a small step up from the car park to the building. This is normally not a problem for pallet trucks, but for some reason the lorry driver’s one didn’t want to go over this step.
The solution that we came up with was to leave the new devices on the pallets in the car park (in direct view of a busy main road) and unload them one by one into the building, and from there into the “storage room”. To speed things up, my colleague did the lifting from the pallets into the building, and I used a trolley to get them into the “storage room”.
The route from the pallets to the “storage room” goes straight through the dining hall, and by this time, lunchtime had started for the little people. This meant that things really slowed down, as I had to keep asking the little people to make way for the trolley, and also to make sure that I didn’t walk into any of them.
There were 27 devices in total. The trolley could take 4 computers at once, and 7 monitors. This meant that there were 11 return journeys needed.
While this is all part of the job, and I didn’t mind having to do it, I didn’t appreciate that when I looked busy and was carrying many items, members of staff were coming up to me to ask for help (but never on the empty journeys). Here’s the highlights:
Trip 3
Teacher: Here’s my laptop that you requested that I bring to you [6 weeks ago] to look at
Me: Is it possible for you to bring it to me later please?
T: When would be a good time?
Trip 6
T: Can you just show me how to move a window on the hall computer from the monitor to the projector?
Me: Umm… can I do it in a few minutes please?
T: But it’ll only take a minute
Trip 8
T: My computer is saying that it needs to have stuff backed up on it.
Me: Yep, that’s fine. Don’t worry about it. We back all of your files up.
Trip 10
T: Have you seen [person in hall] recently?
Me: Have you checked the hall? [which is right next to the dining room and had the door open]
Trip 11
Little Person: Goodbye Mr Zoo man [we had ordered some Zoostorm computers]
OK, the last one cheered me up, but for some reason teachers don’t ask me questions when I’m just walking to a location, but when I’m loaded up with heavy boxes they ask me to perform some quite awkward tasks.