Soul singer-songwriter William Bell probably expressed best what we were going through here at the Imperial Valley Press on Friday afternoon: âYou donât miss your water, until your well runs dry.â
It was somewhere between 11 and 11:30 that morning as I was working on answering emails from my new boss when suddenly the information I was updating in a Google document wouldnât update anymore. It didnât take me long to figure out Iâd lost my internet connection, because, hey, I pride myself on having a firm grasp of the obvious, and besides, thatâs what internet service does â it stops working.
And it, usually, it starts working again.
Except this time it didnât.
And when I say it stopped working, I mean almost everything stopped working: our office phones, our internet, most of our cell phones and some of our servers.
Initially we didnât sweat it too much, because, really, how often do these things turn out to be anything serious? So we did what offices do, we had a small going-away party for one of our co-workers and ate cake.
I even gave a short speech.
But when we were done with that, the internet and phone services still werenât working. Thatâs when we started to get nervous.
We still donât know exactly what caused the fire that started along Interstate 8 near Alpine Friday, but based on what weâve know so far, it sounds suspiciously like the work of a lit cigarette being flicked out of a window.
In any case, it didnât take too long for it to disrupt service for AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint and their various subscribers. It also took out our backup service for reasons we still donât fully understand.
By 3 oâclock, we were approaching panic mode. Nearly everything we do these days in putting together a newspaper is dependent on telephones and internet. National and international stories, as well as our syndicated content, are downloaded from websites. A fair amount of our research comes from email and telephone conversations as well as online documents. Even our printer receives our pages via a web page.
Meanwhile, I learned from my wife that our internet service at home wasnât working, either, for totally unrelated and still mysterious reasons.
So I couldnât move my base of operations there.
It turns out we had been able to collect some of our materials before we lost service. As it also happened, one cellular service, which shall remain nameless (hint: it begins with a V), was not affected by the fire, so with the assistance of staff members who still had service, we were able to cobble together a newspaper for Saturday.
Meanwhile, my wife, bless her heart, harangued our internet service provider at home to get our service working long enough for me to upload our pages to the printer. Shortly thereafter, that service crapped out again, and the repairman isnât expected until Tuesday.
At which point we are having a landline reinstalled.
