InsideTech

In all my years in IT (I started in 1992), I have held many jobs.  My favorite has to be "college professor" (no sarcasm, I actually LOVE teaching).  I have been teaching computer science classes at the post-secondary level since 1996.  However, in those years, I have run into some great students, as well as some real boneheads...  For example:

I was teaching a DOS class, and one of my students spilled an entire large coffee from Dunkin' Donuts (you know how large they are) into the keyboard.  There was so much coffee, it actually filled the keyboard and was pouring out over the sides in waterfalls.  From that day on, I told my students, "YOU are allowed to eat or drink in class; your COMPUTER is not."

During a Novell NetWare class, we were discussing NDS rights to the NetWare network, and how you, as the administrator, could even lock yourself out of things if you weren't careful.  Well, as I'm discussing this, one of my students (who was a complete "know-it-all") actually deleted his rights to manage his own account.  And of course, he never created a "backdoor" user, for times such as these, so he in effect locked himself out of his own account, dumb-a*s...  To make an example out of other would be know-it-alls in his class, I hooked up my PC to the overhead projector and proceeded to display and lecture about the entire process of fixing his user account.

Then, during a Windows 2000 class, I was in front of the room lecturing and drawing diagrams on the whiteboard.  At that time, the school didn't have a "content filter" (we were a college after all, so they didn't think it was right to block stuff).  Well, the way the class was setup, the door (which had a HUGE window) was in the back of the room.  So, anyone walking by the room could look in and see me at the front of the room, and see what the students were doing on their computers as well.  Many times during a semester, an admissions representative would walk through the computer lab area to show prospective students how "new and advanced" we were.  So, on this one particular day, I'm in front of the room, doing my thing, and the one student (the dumb-a*s actually CHOSE to sit at the workstation closest to the door, was surfing porn.  Well, wouldn't you know that an admissions rep walks by with an 18 year-old high school senior, his FOURTEEN year-old sister, and his mom and dad.  The admissions rep had his back to me, as he was telling them how great our school was, but I could tell something was wrong by the way the younger sister's eyes LIT UP, and her mom's mouth dropped open.  The rep turned to see what they were gawking at, then took them on a bee-line outta there.  So, I know I'm in trouble now, as the rep would tell my department head and I would be read the riot act.  I make my way to the back of the room, still talking about Windows, and I sneak up behind the guy and he's so ingrossed in looking at breasts, that he doesn't even see me behind him till I drive my fist down on his keyboard and start screaming at him.  Needless to say, I got reprimanded for "not controlling my class," and I made that guy move to the farthest seat away from the door.

Then, I was teaching another DOS class, but before class started, I switched the keyboard cables between two computers (the room was setup where the PCs were back-to-back).  We covered the DIR command and all the command-line options you could use with it, and during the "practice" portion of the class, I sat at one of the "switched PCs", while one of my students sat at the other (but he didn't know I switched the cables).  So, I was asking, "how do you display the results of DIR sorted in order by name?" and they were to type out the command.  Well, when he typed on his keyboard, the text appeared on my screen.  So, as the stuff he would type appeared on my screen, I typed a similar command but spelled it wrong (DIRT, or DIE for example), or typed it very slowly, and whatever I typed would appear on his screen.  Every time I would press enter and he would see "Bad command or file name," he would get PISSED.  He was cursing at the computer (which made it even funnier), but I had to stop when he started beating on the keyboard.  I guess, because I was the guy who was the cause of the problem, that makes me the "bonehead user," but it doesn't change the fact that it was one of the funniest moments in my teaching career.

Still in college now, so I think I can add some.

I was able to convert one of my friends to be a Linux user.  He became a terminal guru really quickly.  Anyway, he recalls a funny story in one of the beginner computer science courses:

"Our professor made us use GCC and GDB instead of Visual Studio for programming.  In one of our assignment, a student looked really frustrated so I asked, 'any problems?'

'I can't compile this code!'

'Are you using GCC?'

'I think so.  I've been pressing F7 (Visual Studio's 'compile' keyboard shortcut) all day.' "