The laptop was stone dead. In fact, I've seen stones with more life - if they stand out in the sun, the absorb the warmth and radiate it back as if they're not completely dead. Unlike this laptop - no amount of current flowing at it from the wall plug could convince the battery that there was life after death. (Clearly an atheist laptop, then - must choose more carefully next time.)
The "meeting", it turned out, wasn't a meeting at all... but a seminar - one of those hoops that academics with some notion of coming to work here have to jump through to convince their prospective colleagues that they've got something to say beyond "do I really have to complete this form? I've already filled in twelve others asking the same information" or "why is there never any parking after 07h30?".
Which meant that shrugging and mumbling "sorry, it's dead" with the faintest attempt to fake empathy wasn't a good idea. We needed Plan B.
Plan B involved a recce of Other Laptops In The Faculty. Which was an interesting process. We have R12 000 laptops that lie unused because visiting academics lost R800 power cables, which can't be replaced because of exhausted departmental budgets.... We have laptops that have lain unused because someone put an administrator password on the workstation login, went on sabbatical, and forgot the password... We have laptops that are under lock and key in offices of staff whose whereabouts are known only to the Oracle of Delphi. And we have laptops whose overstretched departmental gatekeepers are so willing and accommodating that they come back with fewer and fewer bits each time they're borrowed.
We did eventually get sorted. It was probably a better introduction to Real Life At UCT than any of inductions or briefings or glossy pamphlets could provide - both the opportunities and the constraints. Yes, there are real technical problems inherent in working in a place where need always outstrips budget. But yes, there are also warm fuzzy moments as people come together across departmental boundaries, and even across the great Academic - non-academic divide, and work together in creative, good-humoured focus to ensure that something comes together as needed.
And hey, who cares _really_ if we only have white chalk in the seminar room?