For December 12, 1996 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 687 words

Blew Horizons?

My week away from school was a disaster. All went well back in my classroom, but the A+ Certification course that science teacher Tom Young and I took was worse than a waste of time. It was a fiasco.

I'd heard good things about software courses offered by New Horizons Computer Learning Center, but its hardware training program, which is advertised at a whopping $1,799 for four days, was presented and taught as an afterthought.

In their defense, the facility was new. But during the move, New Horizons tried to carry on with business as usual. This mistake hurt everyone. Their training laboratory was barren of tools, diagnostics, and software. It consisted of two rows of tables and sixteen computers. Eight students had eight working Windows 3.11 systems and eight older systems to take apart. But, we had no screwdrivers.

John, the new, young instructor, left and rounded up a few. Several were stripped, so four of us shared one good screwdriver. The next day, Tom and I brought our own tools.

On day one we read from the manual, removed the computer cases, unscrewed the hard drives, and went home.

On day two we read from the manual and formatted our hard drives. John wanted to discuss diagnostics, but our disks were clean. He ran out and got one copy of Norton Utilities that took an hour to load it onto eight computers. Individuals played with it while waiting, but we never discussed Norton as a class.

John spent most of his time answering hundreds of basic questions for one woman in the class who knew next to nothing about computers. The rest of us twiddled our thumbs and made little batch files from the manual.

That day I went as class spokesman to the front office and complained that we had no supplies and the course was stalled.

On day three we received a box full of sound cards and one CD-ROM drive. The plan was to install sound cards, and take turns installing one CD-ROM drive. Before we started, the instructor decided to install Windows95 onto the eight stations from one server. I advised him that installing Windows95 across a network could be disastrous because workstations usually lose their network connections prior to complete installation. And that's what happened. The classroom crashed. We all fell off the network with incomplete installations of Windows95. We spent the rest of the day trying to Jerry-rig the computers.

On the last day, John came in early and started over with an NT server. He got Windows95 working in slow DOS-compatibility mode, but we still couldn't access the network. By now we had been completely off the course curriculum for two days.

He tried to show us Microsoft Mail for some reason, and that didn't work. All he could get to work across the network was the card game Hearts, so we played Hearts for an hour. Some of us did get our sound cards working, but the CD-ROM drive never did work.

Ironically, we ended talking about customer satisfaction and business ethics.

When the course closed, I hung back and interviewed the instructor. He was flown in from Dallas, had never taught hardware repair before, had no A+ Certification, and no time to prep or become familiar with his lab. He was an NT instructor, filling in. He said, "When they asked me to fly out here, I couldn't believe that there was no one in California who could teach this class."

I don't fault John. Management put him in a compromising and embarrassing position. His inexperience plus our barren lab resulted in eight high-paying customers spending four days puttering with basics and installing software incorrectly.

I called New Horizons on Friday, requesting a refund and reimbursement for eight days of substitute teachers. They apologized and promised to get back to me on Monday. I called my rep. Mark Bedell on Tuesday. He promised to give Tom and me a full refund. And to pay back the school for the substitute expenses, he offered a handful of coupons good for free software classes. That will appease me, and we'll have another go.