#NationalStressAwarenessDay2024
…as are most of the techs reading this I would guess. Some of you south of the M4 will know me, if nothing else for being one of the tallest ones here, I’ve been in this industry for 30 plus years and I’ve been fortunate to have met so many wonderful people in that time. Some in person day to day, some via EduGeek, ANME and RM events (RM do the best lunches if you’re wondering why I went to them…), some once a year in London at BETT and some I’ve never met in person but chat to on-line in forums like we’ve known each other since primary school and still have coffee and a catch-up in that little café when we both happen to be in town.
The education tech world is a close one and we all look after each other, if any one of us is ever stuck, others are more than happy to jump in and assist, share code, offer solutions or just say “yup, it does that for me as well” which is all the reassurance you sometimes need to know you haven’t just done something really stupid to hundreds of workstations simultaneously via a GPO or an intune policy. If a nearby school gets hit by a ransomware attack, you offer to help, you provide equipment if needed, you’re on the end of a phone for the tech team working all night trying to repair the damage etc. That’s what we do, that’s what makes our world so special.
Sometimes the community comes together under difficult circumstances, for those of us who knew him in person or on-line, the sudden loss of DJ-1701 hit hard, I saw him in person a couple of weeks before, he was there on the Friday helping me online with a powershell script, he was always there helping anyone who asked, he was an amazing coder and tech, and then on the Saturday night he was gone, taken in an instant in his sleep to the great AFK in the sky. His parents took great comfort in all the messages posted on-line, colleagues made sure they were all printed and given to them before the funeral which was also live streamed so we could all be there in spirt if not physically. Community defined right there.
I’m fortunate that many of you have been to my little school next to the 123m tall spire, either for south coast socials, one to ones, dropped in to borrow kit or the epic EDIT in 2019 when I heard myself say “yes of course we’ll host 200 people” and the enormous job that turned into!! As an IT Manager I’ve done OK for a career, I ran a massive FE institution for 15 years over 19 sites and now have spent 16 years in a single academy school where I’ve worked hard to be successful, turned a broken network into a stable 24/7 system that is the lifeblood of the school. I’ve worked long days, I’ve come home and answered emails, teams messages, WhatsApp’s, smoke signals etc, spent weekends working on stuff into the small hours just so that class on Monday runs that lesson without a hitch. In all my years you often get the snotagram message about a faulty PC ruining a teacher’s lesson, missing mouse etc, you never get one saying “thanks, that PowerPoint ran fine, the embedded video worked etc”. You just learn to accept that that’s how it is, it’s a thankless job but we still do it because we love our jobs.
And that was my life, working hard, going home, working just as hard at home and being that invisible cog in the wheel that you think will bring everything else down if that cog stops turning.
Early in 2024 I started to feel rubbish, not man flu rubbish but really struggling to get up in the morning rubbish, unable to lie down at night and breathe rubbish, every breath sounding under water rubbish. The diagnosis was pneumonia, the pills were strong, but at the time I was a one-man band at work, the deputy post had just been vacated (he moved to a fab new job, we are still friends) and had yet to be advertised, year 13 mocks were about to start and the workload was not one you could take a week off to recover. So I ploughed on, that vital cog still whirling away despite that cog sounding like a rusty barn hinge in the wind. I did go to the Friday at BETT, probably not my finest decision but I needed a change of scenery and see my friends. I struggled all day and slept on the train all the way home, thankfully woken up before my station by a tech from another school who looked after me that day. Fast forward to mid February and people were starting to tell me I looked seriously unwell, several used the term grey, death warmed up was used more than once and I remember saying to a member of staff I am close to that I had hit the wall and was looking forward to half term just to recharge.
That night was rough, another night in the lounge propped up in the big chair as that was the only position I could breathe in, another sleepless night. The following morning as fate would have it I had to go somewhere at 7am with my partner before going on to work, we drove in separate cars and when I arrived something wasn’t right. I could hardly breathe, all colour had gone from my skin and every breath was shallower than the previous one. My partner threw me in her car and drove the 10 miles to the nearest hospital ignoring the 40mph limits once or twice and literally wheeled me into A&E. I was met by a triage nurse who took an ecg, within two minutes I was in crash having a heart attack surrounded by medics and five minutes after that I was on the operating table in the cath lab having life saving cardiac surgery.
I had a completely blocked heart, medically known as a LV Dysfunction, also known in the trade as the “Widow Maker”. I had zero oxygen flow through the heart and was in complete shutdown. Another 5 to 10 mins and I would have been toast. But somehow I wasn’t. Fate had decided despite the odds that today wasn’t that day, the surgeons skilfully saved my life and I didn’t have to leave colleagues at work to deal with me dead in my work chair, for that’s invariably what would have happened if my daily routine had been followed.
It transpired a couple of days later that I was the first and only patient the surgeon had saved with my symptoms, no one walks through that door and goes home again with the severity of my condition. I spent two weeks in ITU and cardiac specialist wards as they battled blood pressure, oxygen flow, chest infections, a pressure sore you really don’t want to know about and a heart held together with duct tape and pills wired to a million monitors, each making a beeping noise that sent you into panic if that beeping changed even for a second. Nurses jokingly called me the miracle man, my notes even had a post-it on it saying the same. Everyone on duty wished me well the day I left hospital.
And that’s when you realise that no one is that critical a cog that you can’t be replaced just like that in an emergency. My networks were all Windows 2019 servers, Windows 11 PC’s and a complete Unifi infrastructure, nothing that someone else couldn’t pick up and take over after a few days of working out why the hell I did it that way or what the wire over there that says “don’t disconnect” is connected to. Within three days of being in hospital work had arranged for a tech from another school to come in to do consultancy (thankfully that tech was someone I’d known and trusted for 15 years so there was no impending MSP takeover to contend with) and the son of a member of staff came in as a temporary tech. A few staff knew I was missing and why but for most, school life went on despite the cog being missing.
All those extra hours and for what if I’d died? An IT room being renamed to The White Suite? An assembly where they announce the news to the staff and students? Family and friends left without a partner, dad, bestie, golf partner, someone to fix their laptop on a weekend? The infrastructure that I’d fought day and night to maintain is still going to carry on working, a PC is still going to boot in the morning accessing a file that will still be there (well until someone in PE deletes it by mistake) and the servers will carry on serving, rebooting occasionally overnight as they pick up critical updates without the need for a human touch.
I’ve been in countless of INSET wellbeing seminars in my professional life and the words just go in one ear and out the other but actually those words are right. We as techs spend our lives moving from one critical job to another, drink gallons of tea or coffee, fizz or energy drinks, eat those cakes and chocolate bars, scoffing down food as we work through our lunch breaks to keep everything ticking over. Maybe it’s time to put us first, take that lunch break, go for a walk round the block, put that laptop away when you get home and enjoy the life outside of work, maybe take more notice of feeling unwell, feeling under pressure, feeling like you can’t stop. Because actually you can, the trick as I discovered the hard way is to choose to stop before nature decides to do it for you.
And how am I now? I had a S-ICD fitted in May, basically a mini pc inserted under my ribcage that monitors my heart and once a week I stand next to a cat5 unit in my house that Bluetooth connects to the S-ICD and sends all my vitals to my surgeon who then looks at the stats, sends remote changes back to my device and changes dosage of my pills accordingly. Yes, I’m a cybernetic human. I’m taking 14 pills a day, I struggle as I’m permanently tired, my arms and legs constantly hurt and stairs are as difficult for me as they were for 1970’s Daleks before the BBC decided that was a bit stupid for a master race and introduced “Elevate” as a thing…
I got my driving licence back in June and I went back to work for 3 mornings a week on the last week of Summer term. I was deeply touched (but very embarrassed) when I snuck into the Head Masters retirement party and got a round of applause as my colleagues spotted me. I had a week in Spain in July after being cleared to fly a couple of weeks before we went and I have a limited edition medical exemption card that lets me bypass airport security. Work have been amazing, my care plan and phased return basically say take it slow, don’t rush back and look after yourself. I have a great deputy who was appointed while I was off who I can delegate jobs to and teach them how to do new to them things and close friends and work colleagues who look out for me both on the physical side and more importantly on the mental health side during the often darker days of recovery.
If this post helps even one person pull out of the spiral, then every word was worth it. Somehow I got through it, together my partner and guardian angel worked overtime that day trading in eight of my cat lives and I’m eternally grateful and determined to make full use of the bonus years ahead.
My name is Andrew and I’m eight months in remission from being a workaholic
23H2 is so buggy, if you can, go straight to 24H2 which is so much more stable than its predecessor
