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Tales of the tech kind

By day, I am a middle school librarian. Many people imagine that I stamp books and read all day. I don't even have a book stamp and I wish I had time to read. I do have the privilege of fostering the love of reading in youngsters. However, that is a tiny portion of what I do in a day.

When I signed up for this gig and got the multiple degrees to make me highly qualified, there are things that no one told me about the reality of being a modern librarian, or as they like to call us, library media specialists. The first they didn't tell me was there is a whole lot of tech. I work in a school system where every child and every teacher has a school-provided Apple product. Older kids and teachers have Macs.

This means that approximately 650 seventh and eighth graders at my school have a very expensive poisoned Apple product. These kids are 12-14 years old. They smell funny, make bad choices and have runaway hormones.

This brings me to the second thing no one told me. There is a whole lot of porn. I spend hours clearing naked people doing things to other naked people off computers. We do our best to prevent the little impressionable angels from finding the dark side of the web. They, however, foil us at every turn and break through firewalls like expert hackers to find their way in. I have seen things--scary and weird things. Apparently, there is unicorn porn. Once you have seen it, it cannot be unseen.

When the smelly little angels are not lurking in the darkest corners of the web, they are breaking stuff. I spend 80 percent of my day either fixing their devices or assisting them putting in help tickets for the real IT people to work on them. They can hack the Pentagon, but they can't put in their own help tickets.

Since the children hardly ever claim to know how the device became damaged, or they tell insanely wild stories of the incident, I share my synopsis and the student's account to the IT guys. If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane.

Student Help Tickets

Request Detail: Student states, "Ummmmmmmm, I was working in Mrs. Stanford's class, and my screen got stripes."

Diagnosis- Math broke his screen. Math is the devil. Math must be destroyed.

Request Detail: Student tried to use his headphones to walk Mac. Mac is not leash trained. This caused a collision with the floor. Screen is now injured.

Request Detail: Earbuds attack innocent Mac. Screen broken.

Request Detail: Student states, "Ummmm my locker wasn't working yesterday, so I left it in my classroom." Student then shows me his broken screen. It would appear that Peeves the Poltergeist was jamming lockers and terrorizing unattended Macbooks left in classrooms.

Request Detail: Student states, "I came from the weight room, um, and there was a white screen with colors." Umm, I don't know, I, um, guess someone stepped on it. "

The weight room goblins strike again.

Request Detail: Broken Screen. The nargles did it apparently because he found it that way after he left it at home yesterday.

Request Detail: The P.E. hall ghost strikes again. For the love of God, someone call Ghostbusters.

-Kristie Noojin Barnett




My name is Kristie Noojin-Barnett. I am a mother to two and stepmother to three. I am a librarian at a middle school, English adjunct, yogi, and a general nerdy weirdo. I have written academic pieces for many years, mostly for the four degrees I felt the need to get. I have always spent my time writing, and have decided that it is time to put my quirky self out there.


 

 

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