You Didn't Need To Use These, Right?

In a skillful display of coordination and foresight, someone decided that the best time to change over all the computers in the hospital would be starting in the morning on a Wednesday, in the middle of the Small Animal Hospital Core roster.

During the late morning, someone from reception comes in to tell us it's scheduled for that day, and if it's okay for them to tell IT to come and do it now. Everyone shrugs and nods, thinking we'd have a bit of time to finish up what we were doing and disperse. However, there must have been some sort of time-space distortion because the computer guy showed up literally a minute later. I'm pretty sure computer guys as a rule never show up one minute after they are asked to come down.

We got kicked out. During the day, I wandered back to see how it was going. First, everything was logged out as  the guy got to them one computer at a time. The next time, all the screens were black and covered in white text, updating or something. Then, they were all frozen at the login, with the keyboard and mouse not working (every computer was like this). Finally, we could log in and get to a desktop, but there was no internet browser or hospital database.

We use the computer constantly. We need the hospital database to look up patient histories, type in updates and reports, make up prescriptions, and a thousand other things. There are a total of five groups of four people (you do one of five different things each week with your roster group), and now only six computers in the hospital that are for student use, plus two more if the nurses aren't busy.

It just so happens that it was a slow day for my roster, which means the only thing to do is work on assignments. On the computer.

Fortunately, there are other computer labs around. There's the computer lab in equine, and when we went down there all the computers were gone. There's the anatomy museum upstairs, which is locked with a key code. The undergrad office gave me the wrong code, plus the thing is finicky about how you type it in, so getting in turned into something of an ordeal. When we finally made it through the door, we were faced with the same black screen and white text as the hospital computer lab! Finally we went to the Farm Services building next door, where the computer lab smelled like cow poo.