All’s well that ends well

This morning I picked up my colleague J, who was dropping her car off for servicing and needed a lift into work. She was distinctly stressed by the time I met up with her, not about the car, but because she had realised that she had managed to leave her laptop at home. There just wasn’t enough time to fetch it, which for someone with a day of planning ahead of her was a bit unfortunate to say the least. Did I make a few helpful suggestions? Of course I did. Did I also take the mickey? Well, maybe just a little bit.

We duly arrived at school, at which point J peered at the mountain of stuff in the back of the car and said “Hey, I can help you carry that, because I’ve got *no* laptop!” Indeed. Offer accepted with grateful thanks. As we got all my stuff out of the car, J spotted an omission: “Where’s your laptop?”

Oh.

It seems that the forget virus is in town.

I didn’t even have my trusty eeePC with me.

Outlook: a disorganised day ahead.

But amazingly, it was OK. No one had asked to use the netbooks that are stored in my room, so J and I used one each for the day. It meant I was using the students’ heavily filtered version of the web, plus staff areas of the network were off limits (although the latter problem was solved by using a desktop machine in the room where I teach ICT). However the wonders of Dropbox, Gmail, Google Calendar and Remember the Milk meant that my potentially chaotic day ran perfectly smoothly: key tasks remembered, key files accessed. No major problems at all. It did mean a day with no Twitter client, but Monday’s a pretty full day, so I don’t dip into the Twitterverse much anyway.

Perhaps the best part of the day was at the end, because with no laptop do the work I’d planned for after school, I simply caught up with some paperwork and then came home much earlier than usual. Very nice.

All in all, it was quite a low stress day, in fact it was suggested that I should make one day a week a ‘Forget Laptop Day’, but I think that might be going a bit far.