Working week

The recent paucity of posts on this forum is the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of this having been the busiest commencement to a year that I can recall for a long time. The first week of term is always a busy time, particularly if – as on this occasion – I have some small involvement in the pre-term INSET. This week – however – such fripperies have been small-fry by comparison to the main event.

I mentioned in my last post that my office – along, of course, with those of my staff – was being moved into our own little corner of the School’s splendid new science building. This edifice – which has been under construction for the last year and a half – is actually not quite complete and won’t be handed over officially until the end of the month. We made a special case for moving early because relocating the IT Department during term time was just too scary a prospect to contemplate. During what is rather curiously called ‘production’ much of our effort is spent ‘firefighting’ – which doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

As a result we currently live next door to the builder’s temporary site office, and thus rub shoulders on a daily basis with a lot of burly men wearing what is acronymically(!) denominated ‘PPE’ – or Personal Protective Equipment. That’s hard hats, big steel-capped boots, flourescent jackets, goggles and protective gloves to the rest of us!

Moving office was – however – not even the half of it…

The day before our relocation we also moved one of our two server rooms into the new building. This involved completely re-engineering the network infrastructure, taking the majority of our services offline (including all of the School’s telephones) and then restoring everything to operational status in the new location before being able to go home. We had hoped to have all of this done within a half day. It took 12 hours straight – and even then was not entirely done! A great deal of planning had been done to ensure that all ran smoothly, but as ever none of our scheming had equipped us to handle the unforeseen. This latter included equipment that had run without skipping a beat for the last few years and yet refused to start up again in the new location – not to mention the discovery that the equipment racks with which our new server room is generously furnished could not be adjusted to sufficient depth to mount our servers – falling short by a mere 2mm. We had to dismantle the racks, drill new mounting holes and re-assemble them before we could actually install the equipment.

We had two days to complete both office and equipment moves before the School’s staff – and subsequently the boys – returned for the spring term. We made it but it was a close run thing and – as a result – pretty exhausting…

…not to mention that the first and longest day was also my birthday! Of that – as they say – more anon…