Well this was the weirdest day of work I've had in five years working at the Daily Herald. I arrived around 3 p.m. and I knew a lot of scores would be coming in around 3-5 pm, which is earlier than usual. Right now, there's a lot of playoffs going between tennis, soccer, cross country, and golf. I started typing scores in and rounding up games where we didn't have a reporter. After about 20 minutes, Nancy, who works in the Neighbor section, suddenly says she can't save her work on DeWarView (that's the database where the Herald saves and stores all the articles and files. Basically, it's our backbone). Now I was not about to lose the work I had done. So I saved everything I had done as a Word file and at least I knew it wasn't erased. The problem was MS Word was the only relevant computer program that was working. The added wrinkle was when I realized the Internet and e-mail never came up and were down as well. They didn't work for me or Nancy. I jumped to two different computers and nothing worked right either. So we had no Internet, e-mail, or databases to work from. This is like Starbucks running out of coffee and cups! And my boss wasn't even around. He was covering Northern Illinois football so I couldn't even consult him.
The only thing I could do was type the few faxed files we got into the word file. What I couldn't fax, I figured I would print out from the Word file and then go home and e-mail that to my boss' boss in Arlington Heights. Oh I forgot. We couldn't print anything either! After a little consulting with a few people with "power", we decided I would fax everything I had over to another Herald branch in Lisle. So I did that, and then wrote down all my game summaries and box scores (took about solid 30 minutes of speed writing) and drove home. I then typed them into my own computer and e-mailed them out. That was 45 minutes ago and hopefully that's the end of my work night.
I don't care how many budget cutbacks there have been lately. I want some OT pay for this!
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