Still undecided what to ask for

I forgot about something.

We no longer have any tech support at our school.

For the last 9 years, "George" was our Keyboarding/study skills/ teach-an-extra-class-of-what's-needed guy, who also was paid to be our tech support one period a day. He did far more than one period a day. He got us set up with electronic grades (through two different grade programs) maintained the computer lab, and helped me when there was a power surge two years ago during Winter Break which fried all my electrical stuff (yep, including my computer, but he saved my hard drive somehow). When a student had trouble logging on, George would have the problem fixed by the end of the day.

However.

He left our lovely 'burb, because it's just too damn expensive here to try and raise a young family. His wife wanted to stay home, and she couldn't here. On a teacher's salary, there's no buying a house unless a rich relative dies.

So he moved.

Today, I realized how much we are going to miss him. The district has decided not to replace him, so we have no one now on site to take care of any problems.

Like this. A mother emailed me Monday. I emailed her back, using my school email. I hit "send" and it went.

I thought.

Today I got a call from the mother asking about the email. That she had sent the email, but hadn't heard back. I went back into the stupid program, and spent an hour trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I sent what looked like several emails, which were not making it to their destination (my personal hotmail address). Oh, they'd show up as "sent mail" and "copies to self" on the school email account, but they weren't going anywhere. They may be still floating around the cyber equivalent to the dead letter office, for all I know.

Never did figure it out. Made me see that getting a document camera, an LED projector, a new laptop is all pipe dreamland.

There's no one to help set it up.

I can't even take my kids to the computer lab, because there's no one there to help when a computer goes down, or won't connect to the internet, or a child can't log on to the student account.

I'm supposed to take my little seventh grade study skills class in there once a week for keyboarding skills; but I can't. Not one seventh grader can sign on at all, because no one has put them into the system.

Oh dear. This really sucketh.