Be nice to techies

One of the best pieces of advice I can give to teachers is: always be nice to technicians, secretaries, librarians, and other support staff. They are the ones who make schools, colleges and universities work. They are professionals and they deserve your respect. And if you mistreat them, they have the power to make your life absolute hell.

Those who know my personal history will know that in a former career, I was a classroom technician. From 1976 to 1981, I was employed in my first job as an Audio Visual Technician where my role was to support lecturing staff. I did graphic design, illustrations and photography for them. Occasionally I also worked in the print room, creating the documents that would later be published in-house. I worked in the College's video studio, usually behind a camera, sometimes editing and producing. I repaired projectors and soldered cables, wheeled video recorders and televisions in and out of lecture halls, tested microphones and public address systems, and showed movies for the Film Society. It was a fast paced and varied job, given that I was one of only 3 audio visual technicians serving a very large teacher training college. Most of the academic staff were great, and treated us well, asking our advice on how best to present their lessons to the students, what technology to use (in the 1970s, the technology of the day was the new Philips 1500 video cassette tape which held 30 minutes, the Kodak Carousel Slide Projector, 3M Overhead projectors and the Bell and Howell 16 mm film projector - computers had not yet arrived, and copying of handouts was done using a hand cranked Banda Spirit Duplicator). Most of the lecturers treated us with respect, but there were a very small number of academics who looked down upon us as though we were very inferior to them.

One particular female lecturer - let's call her Sadie Stick - was well known for her impatience, temper tantrums and general arrogance. The staff were not particularly keen on her, and neither were the students. One day, after I had set up all of the teaching equipment for the morning lectures, and double checked it was all working in each room, I was back down in the AV workshop, about to launch into the day's scheduled repairs. The phone rang. It was Sadie. She was furious. She demanded that I come upstairs immediately into her lecture room, because the Overhead Projector she had ordered was faulty. I made my way quickly up the stairway and found her lecture room.

I walked in, and there she was, in front of almost a hundred students, hands on hips, glaring at me. I think she was having a particularly bad day. She launched into a diatribe about how incompetent I was, and how I couldn't even be trusted to provide a working Overhead Projector. Dr Stick berated me for wasting her time, and that of all her students (who I must say looked distinctly embarrassed by her tirade). She said she was going to report me for negligence, and see to it that I was disciplined. She pointed to the Overhead Projector, and demonstrated that it was not working. She clicked the switch on and off, on and off, on and off, to make sure that I received the message loud and clear exactly how angry she was. And at about that point, I think Dr Sadie Stick ran out of steam.

I looked around the room theatrically. I walked over to the power socket and flicked on the switch. The light from the Overhead Projector blazed gloriously on the screen. I then calmly, and without a word, walked out of the room... to absolute silence.

Image source by Alan Levine


Be nice to techies... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.