These are some assembly instructions that the computer is happily running with no keyboard input. The keyboard input is then coming in as an interrupt demanding immediate processing which is silencing the poor background bird process.

Same here. My teacher gave us the line “Dessert has two 's’es because it is Sweet and Sugary”.

It depends. If everything is stored unencrypted on the drive it’s pretty easy to reset passwords or boot to a USB and access everything. If it’s locked down hard you could be SOL. The worst I’ve seen happen is the loss of family photos with people who had passed away so they were irreplaceable.

Is it though? I definitely had teachers in middle/high school with oddball requirements like “only physical books more than 10 years old are valid sources”. Total nonsense but it does happen. College is a place where you are meant to have these bad assumptions challenged and corrected. Presumably after a response they’ll be better for it.