Soul singer and songwriter William Bell perhaps put it best what we were going through here at the Imperial Valley Press on Friday afternoon: “You don’t run out of water, ’til your well runs dry.”
It was sometime between 11 and 11:30 that morning, while I was working on answering emails from my new boss, when suddenly the information I was updating in a Google Doc would no longer update. It didn’t take me long to realize that I had lost my internet connection because, hey, I pride myself on having a strong grasp of the obvious, and besides, that’s what internet service does. it stops working.
And usually, it starts working again.
And when I say it didn’t work, I mean pretty much everything stopped working: our office phones, our internet, most of our cell phones, and some of our servers.
We didn’t sweat it too much at first because, really, how often do these things turn out to be something serious? So we did what offices do, threw a little going away party for one of our colleagues and had cake.
I even gave a short speech.
But when we were done with that, the internet and phone services were still down. That’s when we started to get nervous.
We still don’t know exactly what caused the fire that started along Interstate 8 near Alpine Friday, but based on what we know so far, it sounds suspiciously like the work of a lit cigarette being thrown out a window.
In any case, it didn’t take long for it to shut down service for AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint and their various subscribers. It also removed our backup service for reasons we still don’t fully understand.
By 3 o’clock we were approaching panic mode. Almost everything we do these days to create a newspaper depends on phones and the Internet. National and international stories, as well as our shared content, are downloaded from the websites. A large amount of our research comes from electronic and telephone conversations, as well as from online documents. Even our printer receives our pages through a website.
Meanwhile, I learned from my wife that our internet service at home wasn’t working either, for completely unrelated and still mysterious reasons.
So I couldn’t move my base of operations there.
It turns out we were able to collect some of our material before we lost service. As it also happened, a mobile service, which shall remain nameless (hint: it starts with a V), was not affected by the fire, so with the help of staff members who still had service, we were able to create a newspaper. for Saturday.
Meanwhile, my wife, bless her heart, bugged our ISP at home to keep our service running long enough for me to load our pages into the printer. Shortly thereafter, that service was interrupted again, and repair is not expected until Tuesday.
At that point we will reinstall a landline.
