The Never-Ending Tech Theft
“Hey mister, can I use your charger?
This might be the most heard phrase in Comp Sci High, where there is a massive, never-ending tech theft occurring.”
Hey mister, can I use your charger?
This might be the most heard phrase in Comp Sci High, where there is a massive, never-ending tech theft occurring.
Being in CSH for the full 4 years of high school, I have seen many things, but what I have seen most of all is the theft of laptop chargers. Many would think that a simple laptop charger being stolen is no big deal, but once they hear that it comes with a cost, it becomes a whole problem. Kids freak out. Their laptops die. They go straight to Mr. P about it. So that’s why he’s the person I went to, because without him, our school would have been dried up of all its chargers and laptops.
I wanted to know how he feels when students constantly come to him complaining about missing or stolen chargers or laptops. And I wanted to know if he ever thinks there will ever be a way to stop the situation of students stealing chargers and laptops.
Mr. P told me that it all starts from the contract. At the beginning of the year, he said, all students are required to take a contract home and review everything that's on the contract. He told me: “I don’t think students actually review the contracts, all they do is get their parents to sign it which then leads to these types of situations. I think that if students and parents really review the contract and go line by line and understand what they are signing it kind of alleviates the misunderstandings of what happens when something gets lost or stolen.” Because of this lack of reading, Mr. P thinks that people are not aware of the responsibility they have for the technology we are giving them.
So when students come up to Mr. P and say that their charger is stolen, he “gets why.” At some point, though, he said: “you had to have left it unattended in order for you to lose it, because nobody would come up to you and just take it away from you.” This leaving things unattended shows that there is a lack of responsibility. Mr. P thinks this is a big deal throughout the school. “In general,” he said, “I think a lot of students will just protect the things they find valuable or important because they place a certain amount of value and importance into them.” This means they don’t think the chargers are that important. “In regards to the schools' technology and chargers there is really no important sense of responsibility,” he said, “So it's the idea that if I lose my charger, my parents will pay for another one.”
So why do people steal chargers? “Ultimately,” Mr. P said, “I think students steal chargers because one, they see an opportunity and, two, it falls on the fact that they don’t want to pay the money.” There’s also a vicious cycle of people stealing chargers because their’s has been stolen. It’s a tough challenge for Mr. P, who is trying “not to give the students everything they want” and also “empowering them to be more responsible for items that are either loaned to them or in their possession.”
In the end, Mr. P offered some solutions, such as students leaving chargers at home and charging their laptops overnight, just like they do with their phones.
After hearing from Mr. P, I went around to ask students from the 12th grade that have seen this happen and have experienced it themselves. The questions I asked them were.
How do you feel about being a person someone has stolen a charger from?
Why do you think they were able to steal it?
Why do you think students choose to steal others' chargers?
Kristine Stackhouse told me how she had her charger stolen in 9th grade. She said: “It was a new environment for me so I had never expected something like that to happen. I had accidentally left my charger overnight at school hoping to recover it in the morning and to my surprise, it was completely gone.” She felt betrayed. No one helped her. They acted like it was nothing. She said: “At that time the school provided charger loners but I refused to use them because they would hold our phones, So I would ask my advisor for their chargers and other students. So when I hear others say they’ve stolen chargers, my 9th grade self comes out and shames them.”
Francisco Reyes said that he feels “annoyed” when people steal chargers. It shows that people “are just thinking about themselves instead of the person they are stealing from.”
Jaroly Vidal-Diaz also once had his charger stolen. He said that “it's frustrating knowing that a student and fellow classmate was the one to have stolen the charger.” But he also blamed himself, “knowing that getting a charger stolen from you is mostly on you since it's pretty difficult to steal a supervised charger.”
Even though many people believe that this problem can potentially be stopped, I unfortunately think it will never stop. Even as students continue to graduate and CSH starts to go heavy on making sure students have a way to identify their chargers, students will find a way to bypass that solution and turn it into a problem.
The never-ending tech theft will continue.