'It's broken!'

How often have you heard a student claim that a piece of equipment is 'broken' when in fact they just aren't using it properly? Maybe they've turned the dial on the multimeter to the wrong setting, or connected up the oscilloscope incorrectly, but in my experience at least 60% of 'broken' equipment actually works fine if you know what you're doing.

Yesterday the physics trip to the Vatican observatory headed off. They don't come back until friday so there are quite a few lessons which need to have cover work set. The trip was booked months ago, so naturally the teachers had prepared everything well in advance - yeah, right! With an hour to go before departure astroboy was still sorting out all his cover work. He came into the prep room looking really stressed and said could he e-mail some of the work to me to print out for him because, and I quote, 'the photocopier is broken'.

Once he'd sent me the work, I headed off to the copier room to see just how badly 'broken' the photocopier actually was. 30 seconds later I had cleared the paper jam and it was working again.

*sigh*