Advice for handling a troublesome network user

While I agree with you on many points, I also disagree on on a few.

I really want to get tough with this lady. At my last job, I worked in city hall under a retired Marine Corps major. He didn't take any crap from anybody. In fact, one lady ran out of our office in tears after a conflict with him, and the next day she announced that effective the end of the week she officially resigns. She was only a cashier for municipal light & water, but still my boss was the reason she quit. I learned from him that toughness gets a lot done, but it doesn't work with everybody. I understand why he was the way he was because I grew up in an army family (my dad spent 25 years active duty), but I can also see it from the civilian side. With this teacher, I think toughness would probably only get me more trouble.

I think the biggest problem with this teacher is that she is highly educated, and she teaches other people in the trade which I practice, whereas I have only an AAS and a few certifications. And to pour salt on an open wound, I'm a mere 23 years old and she just turned 40 (her birthday is a couple days before mine). So I can see where she might feel threatened by the young hot shot who comes in and takes over. The last administrator here gave her special attention, the school counselor here who I have been talking with said it best when she said I don't kiss her ass like the last guy did.

I can't confirm it, but I suspect she may have applied for this job and I may have beat her to it. The people who conducted my interview were the high school principal, the superintendent, and the guy I replaced. But the person who was my primary contact throughout the application process was this teacher, which seems a little odd to me. And last summer a few days before school started, we had a staff meeting with several new employees, so we went around the room introducing ourselves. She introduced herself before me, and part of the introduction was what your job was. She said she was "Technology Coordinator", which is my official job title. She should have said "Business/Technology Instructor". At first I just shrugged it off and I labeled myself as network administrator, which is accurate. So I guess you are right in saying that my ego has been taking over, because a lot lately that brief moment in history has been bugging me.

I think we did actually come to a resolution today though. I wrote a rough draft of an official statement saying that if she wants control of her equipment in the classroom, she gets it 100% with no help from me. I gave it to the principal, and he thought it might come off as offensive to her, so he told me to rewrite it and let her have admin privileges, but make sure she knows that I'll be available for assistance when needed. I made sure it clearly said that when she does needs help, she should submit a formal work order to the office for the superintendent (my boss) to approve and pass on to me. Most of the time she just sends a student to my office for help, and when that happens again I'll tell the student to tell her to submit a work order. Of course I'll use my better judgment on a case by case basis, so if a student comes from her class with something I can fix by just simply typing a command or two then I'll do it. But if it requires ordering new hardware or software, or might mean a couple hours spent in her room, then I'll make sure I have the work order beforehand. Third period tomorrow is her free period, so I'm going to start going to each of the computers in her room and adding a special account in the admin group for her, and I'll change the deep freeze password to one I will tell her. Anything I don't get done during that period I will finish after school. And today I personally told her I would have everything set up for her by the end of the day tomorrow.

So in a way, I bowed down to her and gave her what she wanted, but I also kept a little bit of authority. So since I've made it official that everything I do in there is documented on work orders, if anything gets fudged up big time it will likely fall on her and that will take any blame off me for students not being able to complete their school work. I think giving her what she wanted was the best resolution to our problem.