My Flexible Work Fail

Even after 15 years of Making Flex Work sometimes I have to admit defeat…last Friday was one of those days.

This semester I teach a virtual class on Fridays and last week, that class conflicted with WE25 in NOLA, so I palmed ahead and developed a plan to literally be in two places at once.

- I packed my conference bag and added in my laptop, power cord, phone charging cord (so my hotspot wouldn’t kill my battery), my class notes and my earbuds…everything I needed to teach.
- I did some reconnaissance the day before and found a few places that would work to teach from (and made note of multiple backup locations just in case).
- I made sure my schedule would put me where I needed to be at the giant convention center and ensured my TA knew how to get in touch with me.

Then I started class. It was going well. We were having good conversations about user stories and covering the concepts of ableism in design and then we got to the individual work part of class (which I purposely put at the end just in case something happened) …that’s when my computer brought up the blue screen of death!

I’m still not sure if it just ended the class zoom call or not, but the students kept working, got the information they needed to provide to my TA and we will fill in any gaps when we meet this week.

That’s the things about flexibility, you have to plan, prepare, and practice, but at the end of the day, you sometimes just have to roll with it. Does anyone else have a flexibility-fail story or am I alone???