Vox Meditantis

Sunday, 3rd November 1996

Come in on a Sunday. That’s what it takes now. The building echoes differently when it’s empty – just the heating pipes ticking and my shoes on the corridor lino. I’ve got my coffee in the Garfield mug and three ring binders and I mean to sort out this computer suite business before Monday assembly or I’ll go spare.

The IT technician left notes on Friday – nineteen separate issues with the network logins, each one written on a separate sticky note, a little yellow landmine of incompetence stuck to my desk. The Acorn machines in Room 14 won’t talk to the server. The password system’s corrupted again. Two of the printers have stopped recognising the print queue. I’ve rewritten his notes into a proper action list, timestamped, prioritised, cross-referenced with the LEA training schedule. That’s how you manage progress: you make it submit to order.

I’ve been at this since half eight. The Encarta disc keeps jamming in the CD‑ROM drive and I’ve had to eject it manually four times. There’s a paper cut on my thumb from the risk assessment forms – a clean, stinging line that won’t stop bleeding properly. I’ve wrapped it in a plaster but I can still feel the throb. These are the wounds we take, aren’t they, in the service of moving forward. Tiny and unacknowledged.

The dial‑up connection took eleven minutes to establish. Eleven minutes of that shrieking handshake between the modem and whatever distant exchange is meant to grant us access to information. When it finally connected, I looked at the Netscape homepage and thought: this is it, this is what we’re racing towards. A blue screen with a spinning globe and a search box. The Americans vote on Tuesday – Clinton or Dole, it’ll be Clinton, everyone knows – and I wonder if they feel it too, this vertigo of acceleration. Everything faster, brighter, more immediate. More dangerous.

I’ve been thinking about the Cullen recommendations again. Can’t help it when you’re alone in a building that’s meant to hold eight hundred children. The guillotine cutter in the reprographics room – I walked past it three times this morning and each time I thought: that’s a blade, that’s a mechanism for severing. We’ve had it for years. It’s mundane. It cuts paper. But now we’re meant to think about everything as a potential weapon, assess every sharp corner and heavy door and length of corridor. The duty of care has teeth in it now.

Right. The holiday assignment. Mrs. Kowalski proposed it in last Tuesday’s staff meeting – she wants something “creative and contemporary” for the Year 9 notice board in the library. Each department submits an invented holiday with a brief rationale. I think she’s lost the plot, frankly, but fine. I’ll do it now whilst the network’s loading.

A Proposed Holiday: National Systems Day (First Monday in October)

Everyone should celebrate the invisible infrastructure that permits modern life to function – the catalogues, indexes, filing systems, schedules, and protocols that prevent chaos. On this day, citizens would be encouraged to organise one aspect of their domestic environment (a cupboard, a diary, a set of accounts) and submit photographic evidence of “before” and “after” states to their local library. Schools would hold lessons on the Dewey Decimal System, telephone directories, and timetabling. Workplaces would audit their record‑keeping. The holiday would honour not leisure but the satisfaction of proper order, teaching children that freedom depends upon structure and that every functioning system requires maintenance, vigilance, and respect for established procedures.

There. That should satisfy her. Though I doubt the Year 9s will appreciate the philosophical rigour.

The network’s stalled again. I can hear the hard drive grinding – that mechanical whirr that sounds like something dying. I’ve rebooted twice. The BIOS screen flickers and I write down every code, every number, because when the technician comes in tomorrow I want answers, not excuses. This is what obsession feels like, I suppose. The inability to let something rest until it works, until every variable is accounted for, every fault diagnosed and corrected.

Outside, it’s already getting dark. November does that – it steals the afternoon. I should go home, mark the Year 11 coursework, prepare for tomorrow’s governors’ meeting about the Ofsted inspection in January. But I’m still here, still testing passwords, still refreshing the printer dialogue box, still believing that if I can just impose sufficient order on these machines, these systems, these tools of progress, then perhaps the future won’t feel quite so sharp‑edged and uncontrollable.

The plaster on my thumb is soaked through now. A small red bloom, darkening.

I’ll give it another hour.

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Late 1996 in the UK saw schools reassessing safety and systems in the wake of the Dunblane massacre (13th March 1996) and the subsequent Cullen Report (published 16th October 1996), which urged individual school security action plans and tighter vetting of adults working with children. The inquiry detailed the circumstances of the shootings and recommended measures to reduce firearm misuse and improve school safeguards, prompting government acceptance and funding support for security improvements across authorities. Concurrently, many schools were cautiously introducing dial‑up internet, CD‑ROM reference tools, and early networks without a cohesive national strategy, leaving staff to manage ad hoc modernisation pressures. Two days after the diary’s date, the United States re‑elected President Bill Clinton on 5th November 1996, a widely anticipated result that framed broader international news in British staffrooms.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.