Prehistoric publishing

OK, maybe it wasn't quite prehistoric, but today was an adventure (and a long one).

To start with, we had a new copy editor beginning today so I had my first shot at helping to train someone. (I kept hoping I wasn't accidentally giving him any wrong information.)

Then, about the time his training for today finished and we expected our big influx of stories for the paper ... the power went out. At first we assumed this was something with our floor or building. It turns out it was a much larger problem requiring the assistance of the utility company.

As of now (12:30 a.m.), word is that power won't be back up and running until tomorrow night at the earliest. I still don't know what caused the outage, but a huge group of office buildings (and Harris Teeter, plus quite possibly homes) were affected.

So, someone found a conference room at a building about five blocks away, and the production crew and editors lugged our laptops through the 96-degree heat. When we walked outside, it was pretty chaotic. Everyone was leaving the office buildings at once and cars were jamming the streets with lines of cars leading out of parking garages.

Once we got to our remote location, we discovered we had Internet access but no access to our servers and database systems, which we had been counting on. So we published the paper via emailed Word document, edited, then copied and pasted into InDesign. And we had to rig a few logos in unpretty ways, too, since we had no access to our stock images. Plus, we couldn't access any stories we had edited earlier in the day.

We got a 2-hour deadline extension and somehow we (barely) made that deadline. I got home around 11:40 p.m.

And while tomorrow should be better since we have warning, we will almost certainly be at an offsite location again. What a way to return from a holiday weekend!