Editors Notebook: It's Always Something

Well it has been a month since I was announced as Editor of the Mountain Home News and at the end of last week I felt that everything was running smoothly. For once I wasn't going to keep the pressroom and circulation waiting on me to get the paper to them.

I had even started laying it out last Thursday because I was not going to be packaging up my pages to go to negative in the late afternoon on Tuesday.

Then we began trying to figure out why my computer-the master computer for Mountain Home News issues- wasn't backing up my files the way it should.

I spent most of the day each Friday in the basement of the courthouse sitting in on County Commissioner meetings so it seemed like the perfect time to do an upgrade on my computer.

But as the things happen to go sometimes our best intentions end up causing more problems and when I got back to the office it became apparent that something had gone wrong with the back up. None of my programs were working correctly and my monitor was hot to the touch, almost too hot to try to touch actually.

Needless to say I panicked, actually we all panicked and after lots of research and phone calls we left the office for the weekend hoping we would have what we needed for Monday morning.

The new week didn't start out any better. It took us forever to even get my system to turn on and when it finally did it kept freezing on me whenever I would go into my program.

It was still overheating and it got to the point where we even had a little battery operated fan set up behind the monitor trying to cool it down. We have some programs to install to cool the system, but have learned you never stop production of the paper once it starts going.

But as the day progressed things started to work better and as we left the office on Monday night we were cautiously optimistic. That's not to say that Brenda and I didn't spend a few minutes staring at my computer trying to decide if it was best to shut it down and give it a chance to cool off overnight or leave it on out of fear it wouldn't ever start back up again. But we shut it off and Tuesday morning, with fingers crossed, we watched as it fired right up.

It continued to run great all day and I am on schedule to get the paper to press the quickest I have every done.

So why am I telling this boring computer issue story?

Well I guess because sometimes we all need a reminder that even when you think everything is on track something can come along that will throw you off course. It is in those moments that you have to work with who and what you have and come up with a creative solution or two-our little battery operated fan-to keep things moving and that's okay. Just put your head down and keep churning along and things will turn out in the end.