Myerscough College Oct-Dec 1999

In October 1999 I was settling in at Myerscough College full time and getting to know people. My own team in I.T. was very small - a Network Manager and a technician.

We had a suite of three rooms - I shared one with the Network Manager without whom I would have gone swiftly insane - Jayne knew far more about networking than I did and it was the network that was the main source of discontent from the rest of the college. I don't know whether some of them thought I was coming in with a magic wand, but I literally had one member of staff full on in my face loudly saying how bad the system was and what was I going to do about it - on my third day there. He wouldn't let me finish a sentence and in the end I said "If you're not going to let me talk at all, you are going out the door!" He carried on just the same and I opened the door and just said in a very firm voice whilst looking him directly in the eyes, "Out!" then when he started again I shouted loud enough for everyone in the I.T. Centre to hear, "OUT! NOW!" Ten minutes afterwards an apology came in as an email but it wouldn't be the last time he acted like that.

The above photo was taken from one of the windows of the office (it was a corner office) and the tree on the path was a rare Canadian maple that a couple of years later had to be moved to allow the building of a new laboratory building. It was under a preservation order due to its rarity and couldn't just be cut down. We'll get to that in a future article.

It was a period of expansion for the college. New buildings were conceived, planned and built and during the three and a quarter years I was there the student numbers and built area of the campus probably doubled in size. I'm not claiming that was down to me, though the improvements to the website and network undoubtedly helped and even those were not down to me entirely either.

The building shown here was the new Animal Academy. Vet Nursing was taught here, there were animals - mainly rescue animals - of all sorts from tiny insects, hissing cockroaches which really did hiss(!) all the way up to a blooming massive Burmese python that was so large it could only be stretched full length in the corridor. It was pure muscle and immensely strong. It didn't mind being handled much, though you had to be careful if it was close to shedding its skin apparently. I wouldn't know - I had no intention of wondering where my scarf was and thinking that the snake would do instead... Again, we'll have a look inside in a future article.

It was amazing what weird and wonderful courses the college offered. Training drivers to drive safely and reverse with trailers and caravans was one, and caravan campsite management was another covering such things as underground cable laying, fire safety and all sorts of other stuff.

30 November 1999 - the sunset from the office window. We got some software to block certain websites as the Internet access had been completely open. More complaints: some of the students in the Equine Department were studying to go into the bookmaker gambling industry and needed to access gambling sites.

Fair enough, we had to work out how to open that access to a limited cohort of students, but then the most ridiculous complaint of all came from a member of staff who wanted to still be able to access adult websites... I remained adamant on that one and he blustered "Well, yes I can see why you might ban pornography but surely erotica is alright?"

Well..." I said calmly, "I'm fairly certain that it's not in your job description that you need to access it and I am not going to be put into the position of having to try to justify the difference between the two to a 16-year-old girl's parents." Request denied.

20 December 1999. Frost on the ground. Christmas break looming. New Year would be the year 2000. We had done all we could to check systems. The dread was that some remote computer that we didn't know about but in charge of something potentially essential and expensive to fix would go Pop! Service 99 years overdue - shutting down...

Just in case, I added some extra keys to my keyboard...

I came in one day to find some of the staff in fancy dress, ready for a Christmas lunch that the college was laying on for all staff. There were some complaints (not from these lovely ladies - fans of the band will recognise Miss Jeannie in the centre) that wine wouldn't be served but I was thinking that even being provided with a free meal would never have happened at any other place of work I'd been involved with!

My parents that Christmas got an extra surprise pressy... a pair of Myerscough green welly pen holders!

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