Keyboard Interrupts Professor's Lecture

"B as in bad boy," a malfunctioning keyboard causes disruption in Marketing class 

Thursday afternoon, in Tom Leach’s Marketing class, the computer keyboard malfunctioned, causing a significant disturbance to the class.

The class began just like every Marketing class had for the past couple of weeks, with students giving presentations on a certain brand or company. The students were able to finish their presentations without any difficulty whatsoever, using the computer. However, when Leach attempted to use the computer, he immediately encountered trouble. Each time he tried to log into his email to download the class slides, the letter “b” would be inserted into the log in box. This was problematic because Leach could not download the file without logging in and knew that without the slides, it’s likely that his class would not have gone as smoothly.

Once Leach realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere with trying to solve the problem himself, he decided he should call IT department. Leach called several times before he was finally able to reach someone from the department. To make things worse, the person on the other end of the phone was having trouble understanding Leach’s problem. From what students say, it seems to be that IT could not understand the letter that was being inserted. So, in order to get the message across, Leach had to say “’B’ as in bad boy” in order for IT to understand. At this point, Leach had the entire class laughing, the student’s must not have been prepared for this combination of words to be used. Once the call ended, Leach began lecturing the class without any slides, just his notes.

Shortly afterwards, a work study student stopped by and switched the faulty keyboard with a new one. With this new keyboard, Leach was able to go on with his lecture as planned, unfortunately with this time loss, it’s likely he did not get as far into it as he had hoped.