@#$% IT department!!!

[Inky_Wretch]

Our servers have been down for two hours now. We're 30 minutes past deadline, with no ETA of when we'll be able to get back to work.

I fear tomorrow's paper will be nothing but full-page house ads.

The main IT guy hasn't even bothered to come into the office. He's working on the problem from home.

 

[TyWebb]

Hope everything turns out alright Inky.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Deadline + 1 hour, 20 minutes.

System kind of, sort of working. Except you can't save edits, nor create new files. So those five local stories the writers e-mailed to me might not be getting into the paper. Considering one of them is a state championship game story for one of our biggest high schools, that is not good.

 

[TyWebb]

Deadline + 1 hour, 20 minutes.

System kind of, sort of working. Except you can't save edits, nor create new files. So those five local stories the writers e-mailed to me might not be getting into the paper. Considering one of them is a state championship game story for one of our biggest high schools, that is not good.

Eeeesh. Hope you bring a helmet to work tomorrow. That could get ugly.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Deadline + 1 hour, 20 minutes.

System kind of, sort of working. Except you can't save edits, nor create new files. So those five local stories the writers e-mailed to me might not be getting into the paper. Considering one of them is a state championship game story for one of our biggest high schools, that is not good.

Eeeesh. Hope you bring a helmet to work tomorrow. That could get ugly.

If I bring a helmet, it'll be to wear why I take a pulaski to the servers.

Maybe then, IT will pay for the needed upgrades.

 

[KYSportsWriter]

state championship already? what sport?

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Soccer. Normally, I wouldn't give a rat ****. But this is High School 1A in importance for us.

One of the other stories sitting here is High School 1A vs. High School 1B in the regular-season baseball finale.

 

[SockPuppet]

Aw, screw the print product, just let 'em read it on the web ... oh, yeah, servers ... Internet. ... sorry.

 

[king cranium maximus IV]

dear IT department in any newspaper:

if you are on call, then you are on call. if you are on call and act like you're never on call, then you should quit or be fired.

 

[Stone Cane]

dear IT department in any newspaper:

if you are on call, then you are on call. if you are on call and act like you're never on call, then you should quit or be fired.

the sense of entitlement IT people have is amazing, isn't it?

"Hey, the whole system crashed and there's black smoke coming out of the computer room. Can you get in here?"

"Well, I'm at Timmy's Little League game, and it's the top of the second inning. It's 14-12 right now. Timmy might get in the game later, so I'll try to stop by when the game's over and take a look at it. Oh, we'll probably go out for ice cream first. Have you tried to reboot?

 

[JayFarrar]

Inky, does your paper look like it was done by typewriter?
Oh wait, that's the LANG papers.
Oops.
Sorry to hear of the suckitude, hope you got out of there alive.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

Jay, amazingly it doesn't look too different than normal.

The desk did a heroic job last night.

As for the servers, they weren't working at 100 percent until around 4 p.m. today. So two days of production were delayed by this bull****.

 

[Flash]

Reboot. :D

 

[Chi City 81]

Did you unplug the servers for 10 seconds? I hear that's often the problem. [/non-blue font believer]

 

[wickedwritah]

The best is when you call the on-call guy/girl.

"Can it wait until Monday?"

Um, no.

 

[SportsDude]

Could be worse. We used to have an IT guy until he died/retired. Now when there is a problem the executive editor (with no computer background) is stuck figuring the server problems out on his own.

Gotta love this industry.

 

[jfs1000]

So what's happened? Has a paper never gotten out?

I remember one place I worked at that had a system crash the night of the Gore-Bush election. Paper didn't come out until 5 a.m. By that time, the lucky bastards who did the front were the only ones that had an accurate headline.

LOL.

 

[hockeybeat]

At one of my previous stops, the system had crashed during first edition. I called a tech and told him what was going on. His response, "Is this a deadline issue?"

It was like working with chimps.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

So what's happened? Has a paper never gotten out?

Saturday's edition got out. Somehow.

I wonder if a paper has ever had a catastrophic computer failure that scrapped the next day's edition?

 

[buckweaver]

So what's happened? Has a paper never gotten out?

Saturday's edition got out. Somehow.

I wonder if a paper has ever had a catastrophic computer failure that scrapped the next day's edition?

Not a computer failure, per se, but I believe New Orleans and some of the Gulf papers didn't have print editions after Katrina.

I'd be interested in a list of all newspapers in the last 50 years that could NOT publish the next day, for whatever reason. Every newsroom jokes about The Big One re: system meltdowns, but I've never been at a paper that didn't come out, even if it was a crappy, high school paper-esque edition (like LANG had this week.)