That in one sentence was my day yesterday, a mixture of business, anger and coughing.

I showed up to work, did a few things then had to deal with students who gave me attitude when told the rules did in fact apply to them, did some more work and then had to deal with students who didn’t listen when told the rules did apply to them, made some phone calls, twiddled our thumbs, did some work, and then the real work happened.

In other words, my education level was finally used at work, as we needed to move one rack out and move a newer one into its place, it was annoying, and didn’t exactly go smoothly but what would have taken professionals 20 minutes to move with 5 people, we did with 3 in probably 40 minutes, not bad.

I finished up my work day figuring out some courses to take next semester (in Art of all areas of study), and helping out some students, which by the way a thank you is always appreciated.

Upon coming home I helped my mother figure out her car, and learned the nav system/audio system so she could be taught how to use it (now if only the car would work).

I finished up the night realizing I was doing things all wrong, only to go to bed after finally getting things just right.

Today I doubt I will be at work as my throat hates me, but I can get other work done I hope.

However what I don’t entirely get is the love of the wordpress default theme, sure it’s nice, gets the job done and is somewhat sleek, but it shows no imagination in my opinion, no drive to strike out and make something unique or at least different.  I like the theme a lot, but personally it is too plain and ubiquitous for me to want to use it on my own site outside of the initial set up process.

That is not to say others should not use it, heck I am helping to set up a blog using it right now, which I guess sort of makes me a freelancer in a way.  If you want to check it out you can head over to brittanymarchelle.com, mind you it is no where near done at all, but that’s the joy of tweaking a pre-built theme and not building one from scratch.

However you can cross a few things off the list of complaints, specifically you can cross out being bored, and not being challenged, but you can add a new complaint hating some of the students. In the past few days it seems the daily monotony has been broken, gone is the days of just surfing the web and randomly doing programming and mundane chore/busy work, and in its place we’re imaging machines one day, delivering them the next, making expansion plans for the lab and all in all doing new things and I am having to learn new things about imaging the machines or more specifically about the software being used.

So some of the minor annoyances of work are gone, in its place?  Students who don’t get it, you see it’s like this.  My job is to keep the machines running, not to help you in your work.  I’ll give you an example if Word isn’t running properly I am required to help you, if you can’t figure something out I can tell you tough.  However, we never do that to a student because it’s bad form and because we don’t want to hear complaints.  However that has changed in the case of some students.  Most are kind, cordial, eager to learn and very grateful when help is delivered, then there are the others.

Some students appear to be unable to listen when help is offered, even worse some won’t listen to the basic rules of our labs.  Sure your student fees pay for the lab, but they are not a right, you can’t come in and do your shopping, and you certainly can’t come in and sleep.

Worse yet, you can’t just barge into our closed lab when the door is closed, we don’t interupt you when you are doing homework, why interupt us when we are doing our work, the door is closed for a reason isn’t it?

Worse still is this, don’t mess with things you don’t have a need to mess with, today it almost led to a door being broken, recently a computer, etc.

I am being purposely vague do to work concerns but I am frustrated, and not at everyone but someONE , yes these complaints are in regards to one student.  These complains almost led to me cursing at a disabled guy tonight, although those curses had nothing to do with his disability and everything to do with his being a jerk.

Things can be summed up this way, don’t abuse those who control your privileges it can really come back to bite you in the backside.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to work on my friends new site, it’s not up yet but it will be at brittanymarchelle.com, check it out, I hope to have it up within the hour.

Here’s the deal, I am taking one course right now while working at my school and looking for a new job, speaking of which I need to post a resume on the appropriate sites in the next few days, so all in all it is simple for me to keep my school work straight and get assignments done in a timely manner.

Or it would be if it were possible this time around. The way things go in this course the teacher posts an unfinished bit of code and your assignment is to finish it, which I have done. I have yet to turn anything in because I will show them to him at the time of the first test which is entirely acceptable to do. Only problem is, the current assignment requires him to show last weeks assignment to the class and since not everyone may have completed it he is not posting it rather he is sending it out upon receiving the prior weeks work.

If he had posted this last week so I could have sent in my work in a timely manner this would be fine, but he did not do this and as such here I am. He posts the new assignment on a Saturday which for one is entirely inconvenient for anyone, and since we must message him, most likely no one will get the needed files until Monday. That is not even mentioning the fact that we have a test to study for.

Now this is an advanced class and I am sure I can handle the work and get it done, and in all honesty I don’t have a bitch about how he decided to assign the work, what I am complaining about is that he gave no warning that he was deviating from the routine. If he had then we could have prepared for this and as such we could have the maximum time available to complete the new work.

Now if you have made it this far I thank you for following my scattershot ramblings…

This teacher is not only teaching me asp.net (a web programming language) but also he is also teaching a course about web design, and when you can’t design a page that is cross browser compatible (all it is is paragraph tags most likely) and you teach this subject something is really wrong.

Something inside of me has always been somewhat horrified of change, I was that way as a six year old and we got a new car, and on every detail in between.

That something inside is rearing its ugly head again right now and I want to find a way to fight it and defeat it.  Layed out in front of me is a real job, one that would mean a salary, more responsibility and who knows what else.

However my fear of change, of failure and even moreso of success is hampering that.  I am so damn scared of what could happen that I am paralyzed, and that has to stop.

It is these unfounded fears that are killing me.

No problem I will simply log in to the student service that got me this expensive software for free and get the key. Ok no I won’t I’m locked out. Ok I will put in a support request with the service, and the school, and in the meantime attempt to do my work while at work since I work in the CIS labs.

Ok no I won’t do my work because I keep on getting error messages that make no sense at all. So now i will attempt to make this software work with Visual Basic Express, Ok no I won’t Vista won’t let me install IIS, something about being elevated, thanks for the great error code Microsoft.

Ok a couple of days later I figure out the elevated problem, I had to run a dos command as administrator in Vista, nothing tough to do but an annoyance all the same. Still though no dice on getting work done at home. So I head back to work to accomplish this task.

Still no dice and still no response from any of my support requests until finally, over the course of two days a support request is answered, and I have access again to my account so I can get my product activation keys. But I am at work and still unable to fix this problem with odd error messages at work. That is until…..

I discover what the error messages actually mean, the teacher told us to put a text field control on the form, but did not tell us to name it anything in particular and the error message did not inform me of an issue, neither did I look for the blue squigglies that indicate a coding error.

Long story short: I hate looking at other peoples code and have a hard time with it, I need to get over it big time.

Now if only I could get work done at home….

EDIT: After much hand wringing, cursing, and emails back and forth I am able to successfully run Visual Studio.NET and ASP.net under Vista. I doubt I will learn anything new, but hey it’s another language I can familiarize and confuse myself with. Special thanks go out to people at my work/school.

Who knew this was a sin, seriously?