Crazy day

I gave my last final exam yesterday and it was a little crazy. I keep all my lectures, handouts and exams in my computer as Word docs and just print them out before class as I need them. There's only one giant printer/copier in the work room in the Music Dept. office downstairs so I have to print from upstairs and go down to get anything. So I usually just send it down and swing by the office to pick it up on the way to class. The final was scheduled at 11am so at 10:55 I sent it down to the printer and headed downstairs. When I got to the music office the printer was in pieces all over the room and a repair man was working on it. Uhhhhhh. I looked a little panicked so the secretary told me to go to the copy center. Ummm, that's on the other side of campus and I'd have to wait for the order and the final starts now. Okay, she said to just send it to her printer- a little desktop printer. I explained it was a 7 page exam and I needed 30 of them, staple-sorted. A desktop printer would take an hour to do that. Creative thinking, creative thinking.

"I've got it!" I said. I'll project the exam from the computer (all the classrooms are equipped for that) and pass out blank paper and they'll just write the answers on the blank paper. So I went back to the class and told them what we'd be doing and passed out the blank paper, turned on the projector and ....nothing. Great. Go to find the tech guy who sighs and asks if we have the right buttons pushed. He checks it and we do have all right buttons pushed (I would rather have been wrong since that would have meant it was actually working.) So he tells us we'll have to move to another classroom. The only problem is that I have so many students in my class that we only fit in the large classroom which is the one we were already in. He tells me to wait and comes back a few minutes later and says that we'll have to take our exam in the concert band rehearsal room since it's the only one big enough to fit and had a projector. So everyone had to trek over there (now 35 minutes past the scheduled start of the exam) and take their final exam sitting in orchestra chairs, writing on music stands on blank copy paper looking up and down from the projector. I had one printed copy of the exam to circulate around the class. I feel like they should all get extra credit just for going through that for their final exam.