My Superhero

In my school, our turns to invigilate public exams are by rotation basis. Our turns come after every 3 years. I last invigilated in 2014 ... and this year, I was due to be nominated. True enough, my Boss Lady approached me a couple of weeks back. There was no escaping. So I relented. In the nomination form, the Boss Lady suggested that I be the "Ketua" - that meant that I would be heading a team if the nomination went through. How dreadful. I wouldn't mind being an ordinary invigilator ... being the team leader came with much administrative work ... and it also meant bigger responsibilities. But I had no say in the matter. Boss Lady could not take no for an answer.

So finally, the day came when I had to attend the meeting as a team leader. We were briefed about what to do - the briefing took 4.5 hours. There was just a lot of information to digest ... and I believed that after I reviewed all the information, I could do the job well. I also knew I could seek clarification from my colleagues who were experienced team leaders before. So no worries there.

The true headache came from the software we would be using for our claims. It used MS Access - albeit an old version of it - so when I installed it in my computer, the software did not work. I tried so many times and it just did not work. I wasn't too familiar with MS Access .... and I did not know how to troubleshoot the problem. I was feeling exasperated all night! Not good for the blood pressure, really!

The next morning, I went back to school and installed the software in my Eee PC - I'd left this at school because I was too lazy to carry my computers to and from school, and carrying a heavy load left me with back pain, and because the netbook was already 8 years old and wasn't functioning properly and yet could handle simple word processing tasks and I figured it would not be such a coveted item to steal if I left it locked in my drawer at school - only to find that it did not have MS Access installed. So, another closed door. Sigh.

The next thing I did was to go to the library and loan a 10-inch netbook from the school. I had the software installed. It did not work. Darn. But after a few tweaks by the IT expert at my school, the software loaded. The problem was that the screen was too small and I could not scroll the page up or down. I tried changing the display settings but it did not work. Therefore, I could not use the software properly because part of the information I needed was beyond what was displayed on my screen. Darn. Yet another setback.

I was getting very worried by now because if I could not get the software to work properly, I would not be able to do the claims for my team members afterwards. It did not work on my computer. It did not work on the netbook on loan. So what do I do? I contemplated a few options :

1) Go to the exams office and have them look at my computer - my colleagues thought this wasn't a good idea as the clerks at the exams office wouldn't have the technical know-how

2) Buy a new computer? Nah .... new computers would not be able to operate that ancient software; plus I'd be crazy to spend a thousand or two thousand ringgit on a computer just to do this job which would pay me less than RM200.

3) Borrow my colleague W's laptop as he had the software up and running - he was one of those experienced few whom I consulted, my mentor. Earlier, he said that he would help me to do the claims ... heh ... how sweet, but I knew he was only joking.

4) Call our resident IT guy, Mr. T to come take a look at all the computers - this seemed like a good idea; Mr. T would be my final resort.

Back at home, I thought of one possible idea which would work - I would hook up the netbook to my laptop with a VGA cable, so that I would be able to see the display on my laptop which had a normal 14-inch screen; So I could work from the netbook while looking at the 14-inch laptop screen .. so I searched high and low for a VGA cable but could not find one at home. I was wondering whether I should go out to the store to buy one, or if I should just borrow one from the school - any projector sets would have one of these VGA cables.

Actually, besides the current 14-inch laptop that I was currently using and my Eee PC which I left in my drawer at school, I had an ancient Dell Inspiron circa 2006 - it's been retired ever since I bought the newer laptops. Let's see - I've bought 3 other laptops after the Dell Inspiron. Dell was 15-inch, super heavy laptop. It served me well in its time. So well used it was that its hinges were already broken. Did it still work? When was the last time I had it turned on? I had even wanted to send it for e-waste recycling this year.

There it sat at the corner of the spare room ... and so I took it out and fired it up. It still worked. It was covered in a layer of dust, so I wiped it with a piece of wet cloth. I scrolled through the programmes and uninstalled many which I would not be using anymore ... and that improved the speed. Then I plugged in my pen drive and copied the troublesome claims software to the C drive .... and there .... it worked perfectly. Heh! Ancient software for an ancient laptop!

I finished doing my own claims in 20 minutes and had them printed out soon after that. So much for the 20 hours wasted trying to install the unfriendly-high-blood-pressure-inducing software! I wondered if I were the only one facing this problem or whether it is just customary for the people in the public service to be perpetually using unfriendly software which never improved with time and technological advancement .... sigh .... it was just plain inefficient to me.

My superhero!
I nearly burst with exasperation and it saved me .... 

So ... my Dell saved the day. It would not be sent for e-waste recycling ever .... it would be kept at the corner of the spare room till I would need it again for the next outdated software which I would be forced to use. So the saying goes, OLD IS GOLD.