A Blood Alcohol Level That Does Not Compute

When I am in high school we have regular “IT” classes. These are ridiculous classes on basic computing skills. Given that it is the mid-2000s and everyone has a PC at home, there is literally nothing to be learned here. We are given floppy disks to store work on.

Most of our teachers struggle to teach anything, but we have one teacher that decides it’s not a battle worth fighting. He spends the first few weeks trying to explain how to use a keyboard or mouse, how to save word documents, etc., before giving it up and just sitting there like a child repeating over and over, “Do whatever you want; I still get paid.”

This probably would have been fine. What isn’t fine is about three months into the school year he figures he’s never taught anything worthwhile at all, so he gets drunk one morning and then sits at his desk drinking “water” most of the day. Eventually, one student decides that mucking around on the Internet is boring and throws a chair across the room. This is so much fun that another one does the same, except this time it goes through the door. The teacher is so drunk at this point he doesn’t even notice, but a nearby deputy head teacher does, comes to investigate, and finds a class in chaos and a teacher who can barely sit up given how drunk he is.

The end result is that the teacher is fired that second and has to be removed from the school by police because he is too drunk to stand and has put children in danger with his actions.

Not long after this, a group of students from several years get together and approach the head teacher complaining that IT lessons are a waste of time and don’t cover anything remotely worthwhile. The following year, the IT department is refreshed with new equipment and staff. Lessons are designed to focus much more on actual practical things such as the basics of programming. While I do feel bad that the teachers were forced to teach lessons that were useless in the face of a generation that had been using computers for years, that was no excuse to get completely drunk on the job.