::A Geek in Korea::

It’s official. I’ve become a computer hating curmudgeon. Okay, to be fair, I still download podcasts, play games, surf the net, and do all the other geeky stuff I used to, but now that I have a computer of my own at work, I totally hate it.The problem with this new computer is that it comes at a price. The price is that instead of working with paper, I’ve got to do all my work now in parallel on the machine. Every test, every homework assignment, and every single class has to be noted, recorded, and copied down on the computer.

There is this massive computer database program that we use to basically track every aspect of the school. It’s haphazardly designed, and like a Korean website, BARELY works in the optimal conditions. It fails spectacularly in all usability and consistent design standards. Any single task will take five to ten steps, and it might or might not work, depending on how the computer feels at the time. It’s designed by a person that HATES users. A simple thing like pressing “tab” to move to the next field will skip a dozen random fields and go somewhere wrong. Stuff like this show it wasn’t made well, and no one is fixing any of the problems any time tsoon.

For the past month we’ve been turning more and more control over to the computer systems as we work. At the beginning, all we had to do was update a list of our homework, and tell what pages we covered in class. Then, this week we had to grade student’s previous homework and also start adding in our test scores. My ID and password wasn’t working, so I couldn’t access some of the features. Later, they got it working, but I had to use the Korean version.

Now I’m not even using the proper language to update ten or twenty fields per class. The secretary has come in and told us that there is a single button that if we accidentally press it would destroy a month’s worth of data from all the of the classes. It’s not labeled, or put in a special “DO NOT PUSH” area. There is no way to KNOW what buttons I push might nuke everything I work on at any time.

My job is paid by the hour, except when I’m in front of the computer. Everyone else is fine with spending their time entering data, but every second I’m sitting in front of the machine pressing random Korean buttons hoping not to nuke the database, I’m not getting paid. Every time they pile on another task, I get more and more pissed off about having to use a computer at work.

I’m now spending an hour to prepare for class, and an hour to summarize what I did in class because of this fucking machine. Before, I would write a test score, and at the end of three months, I’d total it all up on a paper and write down a comment and forget about it. Now I’ve got to worry about this EVERY DAY.

The upside is that when evaluations roll around, all the data SHOULD be there, and all we’d need to do is to add a comment and be done with it. I’m sure just to do that will take 20 steps, fail most of the time, and make no logical sense when written down. I was annoyed to come in early, and I’m twice as pissed of about staying late. I’m not getting paid for this computer time, and I don’t have ANY time to do the work during the day. It’s beyond annoying.