A Learning Experience
Jakob M. had the great pleasure of working as a System Administrator in a German school district. At times it was rewarding work. Most of the time it involved replacing keyboard keys mischievous children stole and scraping gum off of monitor screens. It wasn't always the students that gave him trouble though.
Frau Fritzenberger was a cranky old math teacher at a Hauptschule near Frankfurt. Jakob regularly had to answer support calls she made for completely frivolous things. Having been teaching since before computers were a thing, she put up a fight for every new technology or program Jakob's department wanted to implement.
Over the previous summer, a web-based grading system called NotenWertung was rolled out across the district's network. It would allow teachers to grade homework and post the scores online. They could work from anywhere, with any computer. There was even a limited mobile application. Students and parents could then get a notification and see them instantly. Frau Fritzenberger was predictably not impressed.
She threw a fit on the first day of school and Jakob was dispatched to defuse it. "Why do we need computers for grading?!" she screeched at Jakob. "Paper works just fine like it has for decades! How else can I use blood red pen to shame them for everything they get wrong!"
"I understand your concern, Frau Fritzenberger," Jakob replied while making a 'calm down' gesture with his arms. "But we can't have you submitting grades on paper when the entire rest of the district is using NotenWertung." He had her sit down at the computer and gave her a For Dummies-type walkthrough. "There, it's easier than you think. You can even do this at night from the comfort of your own home," he assured her before getting up to leave.
Just as he was exiting the classroom, he heard her shout, "If you were my student, I would smack you with my ruler!" Jakob brushed it off and left to answer a call about paper clips jammed in a PC fan.
The next morning, Jakob got a rare direct call on his desk phone. It was Frau and she was in a rage. All he could make out between strings of aged German cuss words was "computer is broken!" He hung up and prepared to head to Frau's Hauptschule.
Jakob expected to find that Frau didn't have a network connection, misplaced the shortcut to her browser, didn't realize the monitor was off, or something stupid like that. What he found was Frau's computer was literally broken. The LCD screen of her monitor was an elaborate spider web, her keyboard was cracked in half, and the PC tower looked like it had been run over on the Autobahn. Bits of the motherboard dangled outside the case, and the HDD swung from its cable. "Frau Fritzenberger... what in the name of God happened here?!"
"I told you the computer was broken!" Frau shouted while meanly pointing her crooked index finger at Jakob. "You told me I have to do grades on the computer. So I packed it up to take home on my scooter. It was too heavy for me to ride with it on back so I wiped out and it smashed all over the road! This is all your fault!"
Jakob stared on in disbelief at the mangled hunks of metal and plastic. Apparently you can teach an old teacher new tricks but you can't teach her that the same web application can be accessed from any computer.
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