Technical difficulties

Continuing the Why I HATE working for Chinese universities series....

I've been doing a weekend class on Presentation Skills this month. The coursebook I'm supposed to use is largely based around audio clips.

So, it would help if we had a good sound system in the classroom.

But, in Week 1, I found that the amplifier made such a frightful buzzing, shrieking sound as soon as it was switched on (impossible to reduce by juggling the settings, and suggestive, I fear, of imminent meltdown) that the students and I found it intolerable to listen to. I had to abandon the coursebook, and improvise six hours of useful activities of my own instead (I wasn't too heartbroken; it's a terrible book, and I had planned to use a lot of my own material anyway).

In fact, I was pretty grateful, because the sound system in this room was almost impossible to access. There's a narrow daïs at the front of the room, a cement step less than 3ft deep. Nearly two-thirds of this is occupied by the equipment console. And the audio equipment is on the bottom shelf of the cupboard in this console - yes, on the floor. And there is barely room for me to get behind the console anyway. I have to get down on my hands and knees and crawl in sideways, wedged between the console and the wall, in order to reach the on/off switch for powering up the whining amp. An utterly, utterly ridiculous piece of design. And emblematic of the whole Chinese university problem.

And alas, most of the other activities I had hoped to use involved PowerPoint slides. And the PPT projector mysteriously lost power mid-morning and stubbornly declined to be revived. The IT assistant for the building was unavailable, because it was a Sunday. So, no audio facilities and no projector. Sigh. Improvise some more.

I badgered my teaching liaison to try to move us to a different room - with better equipment - for this week. She told me this was impossible, none of the other rooms were "available". More classic Chinese university nonsense! I checked last week, and hardly any of the 100 teaching rooms in this building were in use, but all of them were open. This must be some strange use of the word "available" with which I am not familiar; they look mighty available to me.

My liaison assured me that the equipment had been fixed. I didn't believe her for a moment. And I was right not to. The whining amplifier had in fact got worse. But we were spared any pressure to even try to make do with it by the fact that it was no longer connected to the computer's audio outlet. (At least the projector held out this week. A fuse problem last time, I surmise.)

Only one more week of this fiasco to endure.

Why did I ever agree to it in the first place?