Starting at Myerscough College

In July 1999 I had put in my notice to Preston College and accepted a new post at Myerscough College just north of the town along the A6. Preston held me to a 3-month notice period but agreed that I could be released one day a week to work at Myerscough.

Myerscough had a wonderfully landscaped campus, as befitted a land-based college. They taught farming, horticulture, floristry, forestry and arboriculture, green keeping, veterinary nursing, mechanics - just about everything related to growing crops, raising animals, maintaining farm equipment, sports greens but also with some diversification into veterinary, sports of all kinds including motor sports, a golfing academy, equine and riding, landscaping and management skills.

I knew that the college had recently moved away from the Management Information software that I was familiar with to the same company's Dolphin software running on SQL-Server rather than Oracle. So there would be a bit of training needed to get to grips with a new system. I asked the company to provide an entity diagram. When this arrived it was a real spider's web of lines criss-crossing all over the place and certainly was not something to be understood easily in a one-day week series of visits.

Plus the college's network was really creaking. This seemed to have been designed by people who didn't understand how education worked at all. In fact, I wondered whether they had designed it with anything in mind other than the geography of the college. For instance the Equine Centre had one computer user in the office. It was at the far end of the college. The I.T. Centre was right next to the I.T. Office and had around 60 PCs. This had the same bandwidth of network capacity as the Equine Centre. Not only that but all the PCs were rigged up to download a fresh set of Microsoft Windows on each boot-up from the central servers. This isn't a bad idea in a college because students like to fiddle. It meant that even when a student had managed to delete or change some or all of the operating system, it would set back to standard when next booted up. But then all other software was treated the same way too.

Servers are just large computers. In 1999 "large" is a relative term. You probably have much more computing power in your pocket right now. So imagine a class in the I.T. centre when 60 students are told "Switch on your computers, login and open Microsoft Excel". It takes a while when all of those 180 commands have to be processed by a single server...

The office that I shared with the Network Manager who had joined the college only in April and was probably feeling much the same shock as I experienced. This room was in a brand new building which had been officially opened by no less than Queen Elizabeth II along with Prince Philip during that summer. Not on one of my days there at Myerscough... sigh... Anyway, the network got redesigned, the Equine Centre had its sole use of a sixth of the entire college's bandwidth revoked and things got better.

The horses muttered a bit but I pointed out that their hooves weren't really suitable for a lot of typing... What really made the difference as far as the students were concerned though was my replacement of the old, by then almost ancient, DEC minicomputer that was in use as the Internet Server and replacing it with a new PC that was actually up to the job. As far as the students were concerned, that one bit of upgrading earned me the right to wear my undies over my trousers and draw a big S on my chest if I had been so minded. Thankfully for all concerned - I wasn't so minded...

The Plant Centre. There were glasshouses galore. The main ones seen here were open to the public and contained seperate units with plants and fruits and vegetables of all sort, requiring many different levels of heat, humidity and so on. In one segment of this building was a room at the centre of which was a banana tree, hanging heavy with bananas. Staying longer than two seconds meant that you were soaking wet and dehydrated when you came out.

Behind this row was another similar sized set of glasshouses where plants were propagated, nurtured and otherwise kept alive whilst in delicate conditions. Likewise requiring conditions to be ideal. This was all controlled by the most ancient of computers I had seen yet. Bear in mind this is July or August 1999. The Millennium with its widely anticipated risk of bug disasters was just four or five months away. Nothing had been done at the college to prepare for it other than to rely on the software providers for the larger Managment Information, Finance etc systems to carry on working.

Here I was, just wandering at lunchtime with a camera in hand when a chap in a blue boiler suit and a watering can in his hand, on finding out who I was, took me into a glasshouse and waved a hand at this computer that was the size of a chest of drawers and said "Will this be alright in the New Year?" I looked at it for about two seconds, said "I doubt it," and left him to tell his own boss. If risking literally many tens of thousands of pounds worth of plants with a possible clean-up operation that would have taken weeks or months was not worth spending a couple of thousand on a new PC and software to avoid, then I don't know what would be.

This was the central walkway through the Plant Centre glasshouses.

October came and I left Preston College and started working full tme at Myerscough. At that point the network was still in a state. In I.T. we were starting to feel aghast at what would be the cost of putting it right, but the Principal came into my office one night. It was 7:30pm and it was known I was working long hours every day, trying to get on top of things. He sat down and spread his hands out. "Just do what you have to do..." I was open about the cost. We split the work into phases with the first phase being the redistribution of network capacity around the campus. It made no difference to the Equine office, but a hell of a difference in the I.T. Centre. We added two more servers onto the academic side of the network and made sure there was separation of the network with students on one side and staff on the other.

I redesigned the college's Internet website and despite some ribbing about the use of earth colours (they weren't described in those terms by others) it obviously appealed to would-be students because enough interviewee students mentioned the website as the reason they chose to apply. I started a regular college news feature and given the sort of college it was there was always something at least once a week to put on it to make the college more atttractive to students.

It was a hectic time but very enjoyable. And I made sure that most lunchtimes I took the camera out for a walk to get fresh air and a bit of quiet time. This path lead from the campus to its sports fields and past the green-keeping buildings.

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