I just graduated from college a short while ago and am back at home while I'm searching for a job. A combination of radio news regarding my old high school and the various wooden table posts on here got me reminiscing about the web development class (the only computer class my high school offered that wasn't keyboarding) that I took when I was a sophomore.
In my sophomore year, my high school acquired some kind of online yearbook thing. It was likely created by my teacher, which may explain why he worked at a high school. My assignment for a few weeks of class time was as follows:
- Carry old yearbooks (anywhere from the 60s to the 90s) downstairs to the teacher's lounge, which housed the only copy machine in the building
- Copy each yearbook one by one
- Carry the copied sheets back to the top floor of the building where the lab was located
- Scan each of my copied sheets using the only scanner in the building
- Open up Photoshop on my eMac and crop each scanned image to encompass each person's face one at a time
- Upload these scanned images using the software's alumnus addition form and fill out all of the available info for that student
- Repeat until the semester is over or we run out of yearbooks
Seeing as this was extremely monotonous and I was in my teens, I sometimes forgot various fields - names, graduation years, sometimes I didn't even upload a picture or just submitted a blank form. No problem - all fields were optional. This resulted in a number of blank entries showing up at the beginning of the student list.
When queried about how I might fix this, the teacher's only response was that "you can't." He must have thought I couldn't handle a technical explanation, but from what I gathered and can still recall, fixing the problem would require him manually fixing/removing each offending entry using whatever backend database they were using.