School watchmen won’t stop laptop thieves

By Ferdinand Mwongela

If only I had a laptop in Standard One; or my first year of university for that matter — or the last…

A good number of the Generation Y upstarts possess a couple of certificates. Some call them ‘computer application certificates’. What few say, however, is that the only applications these certificates might give you a license to is Microsoft Office.

It’s interesting how a good number of these proud owners of ‘computer application certificates’, yours truly included, had to endure a couple of weeks going to a ‘college’ behind some alley. That or at a corridor on the third floor of dusty building to learn that a mouse has nothing to do with animals and booting has nothing to do with your legs.

Tortoise

They also had to carefully save — some still are —to own that magical thing called a computer.

In many colleges, at least a few years back, anyone with a computer in his college room was a demi-god.

It didn’t matter whether the computer in question was a tortoise in plastic casing that gave you enough time to rush to the gents and come back as it loaded one thing or the other.

Not that we are begrudging Standard One pupils the joys of drooling on those fancy keyboards. But perhaps the laptops ought to be given to college students. Nothing is as painful as watching some Generation Y kids struggling to type an entire document with ‘swag’ using one finger, as they frantically search for the next key on the keyboard.

It should be pure entertainment watching some of the teachers — clueless about computers — who taught some of us in primary school trying to figure out what to do with the gadgets.

Wisdom says they might have some help in the form of village louts who had the opportunity of attending computer colleges for ‘computer application courses’. Some call them computer packages.

I fear for the little ones, though. There might be no carefree time in the class, squirting water on your classmates’ back when the teacher’s head is turned, what with all that gadgetry around? Unless public schools have changed over the years, and come up with proper lockers and not the benches we sat on.

Sleepy-eyed

Of course some clever chap always thought a boy sandwiched between two girls, which we hated, was the key to concentration in class.

Still, if village school can’t secure textbooks bought with free primary education funds safe from chicken thieves, I shudder to imagine what will happen to the laptops.

If UK is banking on the toothless, rickety and sleepy-eyed primary school watchman to keep an eye on them, good luck.