THIS WORLD OF HURT
I attribute the acronym SNAFU to the military, although I’m not sure anyone knows where it came from. The military has an acronym for just about everything and is outstanding at naming things for what they are or represent. SNAFU is a wonderful explanation for events that turn an otherwise straightforward day into a mess… it certainly sums up this week’s press day.
Each week, the Chronicle’s staff engage in a series of tasks that each add to the escalating tensions that come along as any deadline grows closer. Our deadline is 5 p.m. on Wednesdays, and while most of the articles were written and ready for placement by early in the morning, the design and layout, picture composition, and the inclusion of any last-minute legal notices or obituaries does not happen with the wave of a wand.
It’s all still just as labor-intensive as it was in the days of literal cutting and pasting. In many ways, the new and improved digital world we operate within today has merely substituted real-world infrastructure issues for information technology (IT) problems.
IT repair guys have become as important to our everyday lives as any plumber, electrician, or mechanic, perhaps even more so, psychologically speaking. If the plumbing is backed up, you can — to varying degrees of comfort — use the bathroom outside, but when the internet goes out, people will lose their minds. I’ve seen this occur in my children.
So, after braving the expanding banks of the low-water crossing where Cotton Field River flows over FM 611 on Rotan’s west side, we weren’t in too much of a panic when we discovered there was no internet at our office Wednesday morning. Seven hours till deadline, plenty of time for the IT wizards to break out their Ouija boards and do whatever they do to make the digital waters flow.
Even in the smallest communities, newspapers still manage to have a healthy Rolodex — which is an “oldworld” term for contacts list for anyone born after 1984 — and we made use of the two bars we had to see if we could find out when service might be restored and grease the wheels where we could.
Before noon everyone we spoke with was reasonably helpful, assuring us there was an issue with a tower but a worker was on the way and should have service restored by 1 p.m. leaving only four hours until deadline... cutting it close to the wire given the workload. As many offline tasks that could be tended to were handled on our end, and by 2 p.m., every tech-guru in the area was standing around a busted-up tower having a Mexican standoff of finger-pointing sessions.
With little more than 45 minutes before we need to have our files in the hands of the printer in Amarillo. We updated them on the break in our SNAFU, and to their credit and experience working in an industry riddled with those and other acronyms, said they would wedge us between some late-night running of a couple of daily papers... if we could get it there before the presses stop for the night.
At least we don’t have to send them by Pony Express. Information at the speed of light. Technology is great... when it works. When it doesn’t, you’re back to printing by Gutenberg and plowing fields by gunsights.
Whether you’re posting by Pony Espress or mailing by Google, when the horse carrying your information dies, you find yourself at the mercy of the Geek Squad, and that Camel is a lot further than a mile away.
Therefore, good reader, I have no idea if we managed to put this paper to bed in time or not. I hope you get something out of it, even if it’s a day late and a dollar more. We had a heck of a time getting it to you.
I’ll encourage you to allow our little SNAFU to be a reminder to buy the occasional book, get those beautiful photographs printed, and spring for a box of checkers or a deck of playing cards, because sometimes we’re just a lightning strike away from the coming dark age.