Locked out

It's been a week of lockouts. I spent most of last week over in County Kerry, on the extreme west coast of Ireland. It's beautiful countryside over there in and around Tralee, but it was bitter cold at times. (opposite is a picture I took of the Ardfert Friary ruins, northeast of Tralee). While I was there I shared a flat with three colleagues, one of whom is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt, Germany. Poor man got locked out. Not from his room, but from his ensuite bathroom, inside the room. He spent the first 24 hours of his stay unable to access his shaving kit, shower, toilet etc. Eventually, he was relieved when the local repair man turned up and fixed the lock. Actually, we were all relieved.

Later in the week, I got locked out of the flat when I went over to the shop and realised I had forgotten my pass key. Our flat was two floors up, and no amount of shouting or heaving bricks at windows helped. It was very cold. Eventually, a passing student let me in and I began to defrost.

The worst lockout is four days and counting. My e-learning website is down along with just about everything else on the WWW2 server. I have spoken to the computing services who assure me all is being done to restore it. It's very frustrating, because some of my students want to access materials and documents, and of course, all they are met with is a message saying the site is being fixed. Perhaps I should call the Irish repair man in again. At least he only took 24 hours....