Monitors. What do I say about monitors? They are perhaps the most useful of all peripherals for the computer. They come in many different shapes and sizes, some slender and light, and others boxey and weighthe equivalent of a sack of bricks. You can have one monitor or many monitors connected to your computer, and they are all a huge pain in my rear.

For the past week and a half I have had one job at work, find and replace all of the old CRT monitors in the school district with newer LCD monitors. I have had to walk around all of the classrooms and check inside to see if they still had CRT monitors in them. If I found any I would then have to count how many I needed and go grab the appropriate amount of LCD monitors. Then I would have to haul those monitors to the classroom and removing the CRT monitors and connecting the LCD monitors. Usually this would happen during a class so I would have to try to be extra quiet while trying to lug these huge monitors out of the classes. Once I got about 12 CRT monitors, I would toss them in the back of my truck and drive them back to the warehouse where I would stack them on a pallet, wrap them with shrink wrap, and put the serial numbers in the inventory system.

It started with just a quick walk around the high school, walk around and scout for monitors, simple enough. There were only a couple in the high school, I think there were 14 in total that needed to be replaced. This process only took us one day, it was relatively easy. My arms were a little tired by the end of the day but I didn't think it was that bad.

After the high school was finished we got to move to our first elementary school, LU. LU isn't too far away from our office at the high school but there were so many monitors that we had to take what felt like a million trips. After five days, LU was finally finished, but not without bruised shins and egos, a full tank of gas, and a strained shoulder. After all was said and done at LU we had replaced ~70 CRT monitors.

The next school that we needed to clear was Allen. Allen is still an ongoing project, even though there were only 7 monitors in total to replace there. Our first day at Allen was a doozy. We started the day by replacing a monitor in the kindergarten classroom then moving to the first grade classroom where there were the final 5 monitors to replace. The teacher said that now wasn't a good time and asked us to come back later in the day. We obliged and started heading to my truck to go back to the office. As we walked out to my car I realized that I didn't have my keys on me. These keys had everything on them; car, house, spare to my girlfriend's car. We searched and searched but we couldn't find them at all even though we had only been in two classrooms. After searching for my keys for about 2 hours, lunch time had passed and we were getting hungry so we decided to talk to the nearest store to grab something to eat. The nearest store was a small convenience store about two miles away. On our journey to the store in the ~85 degree heat, we almost got hit by a car and chased by a pitbull (who turned out to be a sweet little guy). When we got back to Allen from lunch we looked some more for my keys and the teachers received a mass email about them from the front office. It was about 2:00 and Josh got a ride back to the office from a kind stranger, I decided to stay and wait for my girlfriend to get off work and bring me my spare key so I could get home. At about 2:45 a teacher came out and asked me if I was the person looking for my keys. She had found them in the toy box in her kindergarten classroom. It turns out some kid had snatched my lanyard out of my pocket and I didn't notice.

What a day that was, I have never felt more like an intern in my entire life. Even though that day was just full of unfortunate events, it was a day that I won't be forgetting for a while. Overall my experience at BESD has been a pretty good time even though I probably make it sound like I don't really enjoy it. The people that I work with are all fantastic people and I have been learning new things every day.

The last few days at BESD have been interesting. On Monday, I shadowed one of the techs and we went around to the various elementary schools and solved tickets at each one. Our day was mostly spent fixing a broken TV and fixing printers. This was the day that my hatred for printers was cemented.

Yesterday, we shadowed the techs again but this time at the high school. Nothing too exciting this day, some more printer problems and a couple projector problems. After lunch the school had run out of IP addresses on the network so I spent most of the second half of the day turning off computers around campus and communicating with the other techs when I did so they could release the IP and grab it on a different device. Overall it was a pretty boring day, but it made for a nice little break.

Today at BESD for the first half of the day I shadowed some more at the elementary schools. It was standardized testing day so a lot of the teachers were stressed out and the testing software that the state gives the schools is broken garbage. The sound would cut out of a lot of headphones during the test so students had to pause and restart the program. After lunch I mounted a TV in a classroom and spent about 2 hours moving a pc in a classroom from the corner of the room to the teachers deck to make it a teacher workstation. A lot of walking today and now I am pooped.

Ah, our first day out in the field. We finished wiring all of the Chromebooks to the charging stations. After we finished doing that we learned how to replace the filter in a projector, something I have never worked with before. It was pretty neat to learn something I guess I had never really thought about before. After lunch we went out to service our first ticket which was just a broken computer. after troubleshooting the computer for an hour or two we decided that it was most likely a faulty power supply or cpu so we then moved the hard drive from the broken computer into a new one and I went back to the classroom and replaced it. It was a pretty good day overall and I look forward to more days like this.

Today at BESD I labeled the final 50 Chromebooks and entered them into the Google database. Tomorrow we will wire the last bunch of them into the charging stations and hopefully go out into the field for the first time. I'm pretty excited for that.

I've missed posting on here a couple times. So far I have still been setting up the Chromebooks, unboxing more, labeling them, connecting them to a charging station. Today I spent 8 hours doing cable management. Hopefully I will have some exciting updates when I get to use a computer.

Today at BESD I was given a tour of the building and unpacked 144 Chromebooks. After unpacking them I assigned them ID numbers and put ID stickers on them. After that I added the Chromebooks to the database at the school. It was a pretty simple first day, not too exciting.

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