I guess I got buned out with dealing with the lab. Hours sucked, pay sucked, politics sucked, but for the past two years, I've loved working at the lab over all. I take joy in being able to help people out with making their project happen, I enjoy being able to make someone's production easier. I hate seeing all these talented people unable to finish their project because of the computers crapping out. This job let me help people that inspired me and I hope that in some way I made a difference in their learning process and work.

This job was different from most of the other jobs I had before, I had the daily challenge fixing strange hardware/software problems which I loved. I had access to some of the coolest computing and production toys around. I have build and worked on machines that I'd put on my dream computer list and was given the time to learn how to use them. I met many great people at the lab, many became good friends of mine. I've learn so much from working at the lab, and from working there I realized my love for teaching and building a stronger collective of knowledge. So the anger, stressed and bitterness the came with the job really didn't bother me that much because under all that bad stuff I found joy.

Lately though, there was no joy. I believed that there is always a solution to a problem, that there is always a way to make things work. But time and time again I had to look at a student and say, "There is nothing I can do." I hated myself for saying that, because I knew there's a way to make it work, but I no longer had the means to get to the problem and fix it. The politics that surrounds the lab has made it almost impossible for me to do my job. For a few weeks I didn't have the means to gain override access to the computers so to complete simple tasks such as upping the memory allocations for softwares. All kinds of purchasing has been on hold because the tuitions we've paid are held up for a new building and equipments that we will never get to touch because most people would have garduated before these things are completed... With that limitation, I have to improv. quite a bit of fixes to make these computer work and they get done sometimes. But a dead hard drive, is a dead hard drive, is a dead hard drive! There is nothing short of putting in a new one that will solve the problem. We ran out of new hard drives about 9 months ago, number of drives on order? None. Plus I'm sick of lying to tours and current students alike about the status of the labs. I mean it's not hard for them to figure out that they are working with computers that are almost 7 years old, and that the Emerson PR myth of students being able to work with industry standard equipment is a blaten fucking lie unless a time machine is invloved. There is that one or two almost working G4s that kinda works, but then who the fuck are we kidding, what we really have is a showroom full of broken computers and the two good PR machines to make the rest look new.

So where is the joy? Why should I continue to help maintain this illusion of a functioning production lab, which will only hinders the learning process for everyone else. Why should I continue to help hide the underlying problem of this school trying to push more then they can handle. My advisor I should not quit when I went to talk to him about it, as he said "If you leave, the lab will fall apart." the fact is this lab had falled apart long ago, it's just that we've been taught to ignore that fact.