[sdiy] 300-400 student hours of work, tossed out by our custodial staff

[Magnus Danielson]

From: Aaron Lanterman <lanterma at ece.gatech.edu>
Subject: [sdiy] 300-400 student hours of work, tossed out by our custodial staff
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:52:16 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.60.0704102347590.16635 at bigzilla.ece.gatech.edu>

> 
> Most of you know that in the Fall and Spring 2006 semesters, I taught a 
> special topics class on the Theory and Design of Music Synthesizers. (If 
> any of you have ever been curious to see how I lecture, most of my 
> lectures from the Spring semester are up on the website in RealVideo 
> format. You probably only don't know that if you've recently joined the 
> list.)
> 
> The final project consists of designing, prototyping, and constructing a 
> modular synthesizer circuit. I had two boxes, one containing the projects 
> from the Fall and the other from the Spring. I was fortunate to be able to 
> show these to Paul S. in person a few weeks ago ad get his feedback.
> 
> My eventual plan was to mount them all in a nice case with a nice front 
> panel, and put it the Music Dept. so that Tech students could make music 
> for years to come with circuits my students designed and built.
> 
> I showed off the circuits when I spoke at our graduate seminar. Since my 
> parking deck is some distance from our main classroom building, I left the 
> boxes under a table in our mail room, planning to come back on another day 
> at night when I could park closer and get the boxes without fear of a 
> ticket.
> 
> On Monday, I went to retrieve the boxes of circuit boards, and they were 
> gone. Further investigation revealed that, on Friday, the custodial staff 
> mistook them for trash and threw threm out.
> 
> I was willing to go dumpster diving to retrieve them, but it turns out it 
> had already been compacted and shipped off; contemplate hundreds of 
> dollars in parts and around 300 to 400 person-hours of time in 
> construction and debugging, crushed and hauled off to a landfill.
> 
> The designs are still documented in reports and schematics (I still need 
> to post the projects from the Fall), but the wonder of the students' 
> unique first-effort constructions is now lost.
> 
> I am beyond angry-beyond-comprehension and gone to 
> depressed-beyond-comprehension; want-to-punch-someone-and-scream has now 
> gone to crawl-in-the-corner-and-cry.

1) Make sure that everything not standing in your office has a "Belongs to
   Dr. Aaron Lanterman, Department of XYZ" label clearly on it.

2) Hold a wake at the department. You and your students need the booze, but by
   openly show your great grief the story will move around and it will be used
   as a warning example in both directions. Make sure the student paper gets
   the news with you pointing at the empty spot.

3) Make sure that the trashiness design aspect of the built things gets out and
   that some care is actually done in how things look. It is less likely to be
   viewed as trash then. Also tricks them into UI aspects.

I'm suffering with ya!

Cheers,
Magnus