40-ish woman walks in our office last month one morning. Calls out, slightly panicked, "Hello?"
I peek my head around the desk to see who is there and realize it's no one I know. "Hello."
"I teach English - do you have any cords to connect a laptop to a smart room console?"
"No, I don't, I'm sorry." (I in fact had just decided to buy one myself thanks to the Mac, and was planning to go get it at the Apple store in the next few days.)
"Are you sure?"
(beat) "Um, yes. I'm sure."
"Well there are other instructors in here, right?"
"Right now no, but yes in general, however only one person uses their laptop in class and I know she has her own cord."
Look of complete incredulity. I didn't add that she must be in a department who actually gives smart rooms to lecturers for their classes, or doesn't only give them to certain disciplines within the department (Sandra, my officemate in Spanish is the other Mac person who uses a VGA cord since she ALWAYS is in NOTHING BUT smart rooms for her five sections each semester - GAHHHHH!!!!!), leaving other disciplines at the bottom of the list so that I'm lucky if I teach in one per semester. In fact the only reason I decided to get my own VGA cord was because I FINALLY got a smart room for my 100-level class this semester and it is particularly suited to doing online stuff since we have so many cool online resources from the publisher, plus the students in that section are ridiculously hard to keep engaged and won't pay attention to any of the more communicative stuff I try to do with them (and really are more valid for them linguistically but oh well).
Nor did I add that a couple of other office mates who DO have smart rooms actually prefer OVERHEAD projectors still, probably because even I can't get my head around that one.
"Well are you sure that one lecturer doesn't have her cord here somewhere? Or isn't there one that's extra and no one uses? I'd only need it for this period."
"I'm not positive but I don't feel comfortable digging in my colleague's desk and our department requires that we provide ourselves stuff like that, so I know there's not an extra one here anywhere." ('Cause, if there had been, I'd have nicked it me own self! :)
At this, Mrs. Presumptuous walks over to the closest desk, where she sees a cord hanging off the top and starts pulling on it, saying, "Well isn't this one?"
"Um, no, that's a monitor cord," I respond, knowing that in a second either the unused gargantuan monitor that lives up there is going to come down on her head or she will finally be forced to believe me, or both.
She finally stops pulling on it and kind of gives me one last look that says she is sure I'm withholding the magic VGA cord ('cause, yeah, it's my fault she forgot her own fricking cord and apparently is one of those people who can't just wing it when some bit of technology in her lesson falls thru for whatever reason - har!) and leaves with a half-hearted, "Well thanks anyway."
If this is an example of even 50% of the other instructors around here or in higher education at large, then
(a) no wonder I seem always to be about 10 steps ahead of most of my students
(b) we are way more in trouble than I ever knew
and
(c) I desperately hope I can retire before the percentage gets much bigger.
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