You kids. You freshmen kids. You freshmen kids with your "Zero" jackets and your "Sum 41" t-shirts, I would smile at you, but for the virtue of stoicism.
One has to be stoic when one's job is to protect the kids. When one's job is to ensure their continuing education. When one's job is to tirelessly fight the battle between the kids and entropy, to provide them with learning tools they need to develop their own future.
One has to be stoic when one's job is to save the kids from themselves.
When one is a computer technician in a high school.
You kids, you freshmen kids, you're a rebellious bunch of little warriors aren't you?
You think you are ronin. You think you can shirk the instructor of lab B-222. You are bright eyed little boys who take up their father's sword when he is fast asleep, peering in wonderment as the metal sparkles in the golden morning sun. You are teary eyed little boys who have sliced your thumbs while blinded by your early, secret rebellion. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
- Active desktops pushed far beyond what one hundred megahertz should do.
- Bonzi buddy, surreptitiously installed by your ignorant click.
- Compact disc drives with missing trays.
- Deleting your touch typing tutor. Really, now.
- Erasing the windows directory.
- Floppy drives that you have stuffed full of gum wrappers.
- Gator and its mean-spirited friends.
Oh, freshmen, young computer warriors in training, you will learn of the ninja code some day; you will learn that it is never acceptable to cry in the face of adversity, that even six consecutive computers declaring:
Invalid system disk. Replace and press any key to continue. _
can not and will never phase a ninja. And even though you are still learning, you of the
razor scooters and vulgar vocabulary, you test my stoicism with your unending efforts to harm your own future. Though you grin and laugh at me as I repair the computers, inquiring as to whether or not I am a
contract killer, I silently
vow to you that I will always protect you from your own destructive hands. I don't care if you call me a
freak to my face.
I do not care if you have usurped the B-222 lab instructor's chain of command. I do not care if you have rearranged every computer to ensure a perpetual state of disorganization. I do not care if you have destroyed every compact disc tray and floppy drive in the lab, even though it leaves me with few practical possibilities to repair your broken softwares:
For it is your spring break. This lab is empty and hauntingly silent. And it is at this time, when I tiptoe around the high school with the lights off as if I didn't belong, that I afford myself a single good natured chuckle.
Dressed in black with soundless shoes, I sweep in when it's dark and rearrange things.
Your computer technician wants to protect you. He knows that there can be found harmony and happiness in safety.
You kids, you freshmen kids, with your safety pinned anarchy As, I am liberating you from the bindings of workstation policies while simultaneously providing for your future. This software that I deploy across the network like one thousand white winter cherry blossoms will undo the distress you have put each computer through with the simplicity and elegance of a single reboot.
This "Deep Freeze" software
Secretes in ice the promise
of education.
And I love you all and want you to be happy, even though I am stoic all the time.