Moving day
When I turned up at my latest school I was shown to a cupboard, which housed the central switch, stock, spares and paperwork and all the servers. No desk, and no space for a computer. No air con.
I had seen it briefly on the walk around, and hadn’t thought much about it, but in reality, on my first day, when I couldn’t place a laptop on the desk, I went to my new headteacher and highlighted the issue. Luckily for me, he agreed, especially as I was about to appoint a technician, and within a few months I had a server room, with aircon (and now two!) and an office fit for two, with a handy repair area.
saying goodbye to the old office
I know how lucky I was, especially when the office was air conditioned last summer.
Back in the day the office was made for two, te team grew to 3,4 and now 7 of us. Bar our weekly meeting, we won’t all be there at the same time – but still the office was cramp. Whenever anybody came in, it knocked the poor person at the end desk, meetings were impossible, and the ability to be able to concentrate with everything a Helpdesk serving 7 schools brings was not possible!
So, with this in mind we have moved over Christmas, to the old caretakers bungalow. It certainly has more space, we can now fit 5 desks, I get my own office and the techies don’t have to work on a chair with their laptop and no desk!
We had to increase compactly from a 1GB UTP link to a 10GB backbone extension, upgrade power and phone lines coming in (we use an online switchboard but we only had one incoming line, we now have 2 lines to handle extra calls, and from 2 internal lines to 5 before calling out to mobiles), but new furniture was also needed with the extra people!
It’s not all roses, we will have to share with music rehearsals daily, but hopefully that is a temporary thing. It’s been great to get the support now we are supporting so many schools, and the recognition that any investment to the team allows for extra benefits overall for the home school.
