Posts Tagged dcgs
On the lam
The Thames Valley Police Helicopter has been hovering very low right over the school for the last 20 minutes, and there’s a police car parked round the back of the tennis courts right now…
UPDATE 11.01: Staff and police have sealed off the rear of the site to pupils. The Head has just made a PA announcement that police are searching for someone on the run (presumably in the fields to the rear of the school), and that as a precaution, all students are being kept indoors and off the playgrounds and tennis courts during break (now).
UPDATE 11.32: Fire evacuation alarm sounded briefly, followed by an urgent announcement for everyone to remain inside. This was apparently caused by the builders, who are on site at the moment, digging through a fire alarm cable. This isn’t remotely surprising, as in the last week they have dug through a mains electricity cable, a telephone cable, and two different water mains.
We’re hearing reports of a heightened police presence all around the New Town area in Amersham.
UPDATE 12.02: Helicopter left about 15 minutes ago, but can still be heard in the distance along with sirens intermittently from the town. There’s a police unit stationed in the school car park still wearing an all-black short sleeved uniform. This isn’t the normal police uniform, and the last time I saw it in Reading train station, it was being worn by an armed officer. No sign of whether this is the case here or not.
UPDATE 12.18: We’ve just received an ‘all-clear’ from the police and the school timetable has been returned to normal.
Going Ape
On Friday, the DCGS IT team, plus a few extras, were led across the country on our mystery team-building exercise. Only the drivers and managers in the group were privy to the information of what we were actually doing. The only information we lackeys had been given was the following:
Date: Sun 13/05/2007 16:29
Subject: bonding event
We should be back at my house for 7:30pm for a BBQ.
Hopefully it will not be raining, but we will go ahead anyway so be prepared.
You need solid shoes, ones with ankle supports are recommended though solid trainers would be fine.
Don’t wear clothes that you care a lot about.
After leaving at the appointed hour, there followed a trek down the M25 and M3. As we neared, we realised that we were passing an awful lot of signs for Birdworld, eventually culminating in driving right up to the entrance. Our driver Steve started to wind Mat up by putting his indicator on as we approached the turning, to which Mat exclaimed “It is Birdworld!”, only to fall back into his seat dejected when we drove straight past.
Instead, we ended up at a place called Go Ape, for what can be best described as a high-wire assault course. Of course, this had some implications which I felt were necessary to disclose to our team leader:
Me: “Janet, would this be a bad time to tell you that I’m scared of heights?”
Janet: “Yes.”
As it turns out, I’m not actually scared of heights, as I had though when getting very dizzy on top of an Army assault course scramble net several years ago. At the time I had attributed this to nearly dying aged 11 when I fell 6 feet out of a tree. However, it seems that I am in fact scared not of heights but of falling, so once strapped into the compulsory safety harness I was in fact one of the least worried people there. Mat got knackered and wimped out after the first 3 courses, but this was in fact an advantage to the rest of us as he spent to rest of the afternoon shooting photos, mostly of me looking cool:
83GB
That’s how much space I’ve freed up on the 500GB student storage drive in the last couple of days by locating and deleting the kids’ illegal MP3 collections, videos, warez, N64 emulator ROMs, and copies of Unreal Tournament & Half-Life, along with an assortment of other games.
I dare one of them to come and complain about missing files.
In other news, I gave blood today. It has since occurred to me that the proportion of blood taken is quite close to the proportion of the student storage drive that I liberated…
A week without the boss
This last week, the Network Manager, a.k.a. my boss JD, has been on a skiing holiday. Given that he is the only person who can access certain systems or has any knowledge of how they work, there was always the possibility of something breaking that would remain broken until his return. He left emergency access passwords with the deputy head, but, of course, the knowledge could not be left in trust with anyone.
When I arrived on Monday morning I could tell it would be an interesting day before I even left the car park.
Report or Instruction Manual?
As seen on the printing report system this afternoon:
