So, the GHC bell schedule. Yeah, that thing. When I first started my stint over at GHC – what we used to call “Good Heavens College” on a bad day – that schedule was a real piece of work. Not in a complicated way, but just… a daily little pain. You know how some small things just grate on you?
The official way to check the bell times? They had this one laminated sheet, tacked onto a bulletin board way back in the staff lounge. If you were lucky, someone might have uploaded a fuzzy PDF scan of it onto the intranet, buried under about six layers of clicks. Super convenient, especially when you’re trying to figure out if you’ve got five minutes or twenty before the next bell chaos. I always seemed to be guessing.
Now, I wasn’t in the tech department or anything. My actual job was totally different, more on the paperwork and making-sure-things-ran-smoothly side. But when something is just clunky and inefficient, it bugs me. And this bell schedule situation? It was practically begging for someone to just… do something. I kept thinking, “Come on, people, we have computers! This can’t be the best we can do.”
Trying to Make Sense of It
My first brilliant idea was to just snap a photo of that laminated sheet with my phone. Genius, right? And it was, for about a week. Then they’d tweak the schedule. A special assembly, an early dismissal I’d totally forgotten about. My photo was useless. So it was back to squinting at that board, trying to see what changed.
I even tried, for a hot minute, to punch all the times into my phone calendar. Like, manually create events for every single period, every day. That lasted all of two days. Too much fiddling, and the second something changed, the whole thing was a lie. I wasn’t about to sign up for being the full-time data entry clerk for my own calendar just for the bell schedule.
Then, I had a little lightbulb moment. Well, maybe it was more like a dim flicker of desperation. I started noticing that the daily announcement emails, the ones that usually got ignored, sometimes had the schedule updates. It wasn’t pretty, often just a blob of text, but it was digital text.
My Super Low-Tech “Fix”
So, this is what I landed on. It’s almost embarrassing how simple it was, nothing fancy at all.
- I’d grab that daily email when it came in.
- I’d hunt for the schedule part and copy-paste just the times and period names into a basic text file on my work computer. Cleaned it up a bit, removed all the fluff.
- Then, I found this little desktop sticky note program – you know, the free kind. I’d just paste my cleaned-up schedule onto one of those digital sticky notes and leave it on my screen.
Seriously, that was it. But it meant the schedule was right there, all day. No more hunting for the PDF, no more out-of-date phone photos.
I even got a bit particular, formatting it so it was easy to scan quickly. Something like:
P1: 08:45 – 09:30
P2: 09:30 – 10:15
Recess: 10:15 – 10:35
…you get the idea.
A few folks in my office noticed my little on-screen schedule and asked about it. “Hey, where’d you get that?” So, I just started forwarding them my little text snippet in the mornings if the schedule had changed. Suddenly, I was the unofficial “bell schedule guru” for about three other people, all because the official system was a pain. It’s kind of funny when you think about it.
It wasn’t some grand IT project. No coding, no special apps I had to pay for. Just a bit of a routine I developed because I was tired of being mildly annoyed every day. And that’s really what a lot of these little “practice” things are about, isn’t it? Just finding a way to smooth out a rough edge in your day. I’m pretty sure GHC still has that laminated sheet and that buried PDF. But my little sticky note system? It worked great for me, and for a few others. And sometimes, that’s all you need.
