Hectic Week
I’ve just come to the end of probably the busiest week I’ve had in nearly a year in Ethiopia, most of which has been involving chasing paperwork and bureaucracy.
Firstly, I finally managed to get the Moodle server moved from one campus to the main ICT data centre at another campus. Originally the server was in the Computer Science department, but the erratic power supply and lack of working generator meant the server was often off. Moving to the main data centre means the there is a more reliable power supply and generator. However, moving the server is not quite as simple as you may think. Several different letters and stamped pieces of paper were needed to allow me to move the server, mainly so the guards would allow me to take the server off campus. It took almost a week to get the paperwork done, but it’s finally moved. There’s now just the small issue of configuring it properly on the network, this was started today but not finished as the guy with the one of the necessary passwords isn’t in the office.
This week work started on the networking for one of the new computer labs (the photo shows the channels being cut in the floor for the cabling). I was at the Health Sciences campus a few days ago when I was called to go up to the Arid campus to show them where the channel should be cut as the labourers had arrived. Arid campus is two bus journeys away from Health Sciences, so I was told that I could get a University car to take me to save time. Unfortunately a drill also needed to be taken, so we had over an hour getting the paperwork sorted out, again, so we’d be allowed to take the drill off one campus and onto another.
The car we were then given was actually an ambulance, but we were prevented from leaving the campus as the papers we had to allow the car off campus didn’t cover the ambulance, so we couldn’t leave, and I ended up taking the 2 buses.
So , having received the call at about 9am to go to Arid, I finally arrived just before 12, all for a 4km journey. I later found out that the ambulance must have the proper paperwork to leave the hospital grounds even if it is on an emergency call-out. Hopefully I’ll never need an ambulance in a hurry.
I’ve finally started to receive post again this week. I had been expecting several letters, none of which had arrived over 3 weeks after posting. I manage to persuade the new lady at the post office to let me go and have a look in the other PO boxes, and found most of my letters (to box no 3060) had been put in the wrong PO boxes, some in box 3006, some in 3070 and some more in a cupboard. I’ve still yet to find a parcel my parents sent over 3 weeks ago, so suspect it’s just gone missing. All of which is quite annoying as last year we had no problems at all with the post, but I think they now know how irritated I was by it all, so the post should be fine now. Please don’t let it put you off sending me anything, just label it clearly and let me know you’ve sent something so I can look out for it.
The final saga of the week is that I’m currently office-less. Although over the last week many of computer labs have moved over to our new building, my office has yet to move, not that with everything else going on I would have spent much time this week in the office anyway.
