Comment by jpleger
4 years ago
Are you me?! This basically was my experience working for a very large school district in the early 2000's. My favorite was they asked me to train a school bus driver to be the newest member of the IT staff because "they wanted to learn computers", it also just so happened that this person was the only person their budget could afford (less than 40k/year).
I worked for them as a contractor for a while and one of the big issues they had was they had tons of money to implement new technology (mostly from grants and things like that), but nearly nothing to maintain old tech. They could buy new computers all day long, but if something needed to be repaired/updated/maintained, there was no budget or resources to do it. So there were all sorts of fun issues, like they would buy computers and before they could get deployed their warranty would expire (since they weren't allowed to buy 3 year warranties on the computers) and computers with bad HDDs would get disposed of, even though the fix might be $50 and 10 minutes of time.
That’s hilarious, at a small school our bus driver was the local it admin… 7 minutes of rainbow tables with ophcrack live cd was all it took to become domain admin.. never changed it for all 4 years lol.
The IT in my district was so bad the students basically ran it for my middle and high school. We did all the desktop repairs and component swaps for free. I don't even think we had an "IT guy." This was 2009-2014 for me.
On the bright side, we got comfortable with computers and ended up building our own little projects (in and outside of school). In 10th grade we souped up one of the engineering lab computers by consolidating a bunch of old graphics cards and played games on it, lol.
That's funny, I worked for a school district about 10 years ago and our IT director was also the transportation director. He knew nothing about IT but I guess they had to give the role to someone at one point and it was him. I think I lasted 2 years before finding my current job.
I've had an internship once at a chain of elementary schools, the main IT guy(s) at those schools were regular teachers that had computers as a hobby. I came in with a few years of school, doing some maintenance, installing some printers (really satisfying with the stick-on stuff), fiddling with the server (a workstation in a broom closet), and playing runescape / internetting in the dark, warm server room at the other location away from the main IT guy.