I have always been pretty good with computers even though I went through school before there was a computer for every child. I see now, that there are tablets in almost every classroom & technology is one of the hottest subjects in school. I never had that much training but I was in an elective class that handled the I.T. for the school. It was nice because the class was pretty laid back.

We would get the occasional call from a teacher or one of the admins stating their computer mysteriously stopped working. We would have to go pick it up & bring it down for a diagnostic. We would find the problem under the supervision of our teacher & once we knew what the issue was we would go on about fixing it. The problems were almost never anything serious & we ended up being able to fix 95% of them but on occasion there would be an error we could not diagnose or one we could not fix & that is when things got interesting.

If we ever found something we could not handle our protocol was to inform the teacher of the problem. He would then take it upon himself to teach us something. It would happen from time to time. As a matter of fact when I first started the class it happened a lot more than when I left it. I remember, my first 1/2 year I just watched & listened. The second half of year one I got to take apart & diagnose some of the computers. In the second year I was diagnosing & fixing some minor problems. My last year I could diagnose & fix almost anything about the computers at our school.

I remember we had a bid room full of old equipment that we could use to Frankenstein computers when they went down. We would do our best to use old hardware to keep costs down but sometimes we would have to go pick up a special item or 2. When this happened it was great because instead of going down the hall to get a part, we got to go across town to get it instead. Now this class was an elective & already pretty laid back but when we had to go across town to pick something up it was like a free period. It took the whole class & sometimes I would be late for the next one.

It was not all fun & games, don’t get me wrong. I learned some valuable stuff that really helped to get me started down the path. That class is one of the reasons I chose what I currently do as a career path.