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January 29, 2010
Bach Phan
Somebody or something cut the fiber optics wires to the network in November. This is what many people expected when students in the Fremont building of the school could not sign into the school network. This was especially damaging because the computer classes are held in there. Computer teacher James Briano and freshman Vanessa Fernandez found rat droppings that were scattered around the room after Fernandez and Briano went into the network room to assess the damage. They also caught a glimpse of the mouse on the computer equipment. A couple days later, sophomore Nina Becquart and her friends managed to capture the mouse inside a garbage bin and let it outside.
“I was scared… it was gross,” Fernandez said.
Math teacher Mark Clevenger, who manages the school computer network that runs throughout the school, further inspected the damage to officially determine if the fiber optics were down. His take on the situation was very different from Briano and his students. He believes that somebody broke into the computer room and sabotaged the wires because the computer room is locked at all times.
“The cut marks [were] too clean to be rats.” Clevenger said.
Four wires were cut very close to the plug and uniformly. If the wires were further along their length, they would have to have been replaced. A wire that runs from the elevator all the way down to the business office, which would have been very costly to the school. The wires, however, were reconnected with another set of plugs. After Clevenger had informed the school that the wires had been damaged, the school contacted an outside contractor to come down and fix the cut wires. To this day, nobody is one hundred percent sure if the it was a person or a mouse that cut the wire.
Computer students had to change their curriculum while the network was being fixed. Briano’s class watched a movie and looked at parts of a computer, of which they would be quizzed on. Students would have been doing Excel work if the servers had not interrupted their session.
