I thought I was going to be teaching english to kids at the Rain Forest International School, but the school just moved from the campus I'm on to about 8 km away. So instead, I'm going in computer services and computer training. In computer services is practically the IT department. We set up and take care of all the computers and all the networking equipment. My place is at the Help Desk and as the Mac Guy. The Help Desk is open office hours for computer help. People come to us with problems, lot's of problems, mostly with their personal computers, and we try to fix them. And let me emphasize try. In the past four days, I just bricked my boss's boss's computer. "Bricked" as in, when I got it, it was worth something. It was a bit slow, but it worked. And when I gave it back, it was worth as much as a brick.
I can hear my dad whispering into my ear right now, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Oh, it makes me want to crawl into a hole. But then I also hear Hans-Peter speaking knowingly to me, "Alex, is God not sovereign? 'Trust in the Lord. Delight yourself in Him, and He will give you the desires of your heart." Oh, they're so right.
So that's the Help Desk. I was also informed just yesterday that I'm also the "Mac Guy". Apparently, Computing Services has lacked anyone with a lot of Mac expertise, and rumors are now going around to other Mac users that their technological savior is here. And so it is that, yesterday, a linguist from Bamenda, a town six hours from Yaoundé, came at my office to express how relieved he was that I had finally arrived. Yeesh. Eventually, I'll also be teaching OpenOffice to people, too. We used to use Microsoft Office, and most people here still do, but Microsoft just changed its policy on non-profit and academic licensing, so it's become too expensive for us. OpenOffice has what we need, and some of the linguistic programmers have even contributed to it, so we're adopting it now. Trouble is, no one knows how to use it, so I'll be going around training people in it soon. (Trouble with that is, I don't know how to use it either, so I need to learn it myself between now and then. X) )