Editorial_09-14

Jeff Green | Apr 09, 2009

Last week we ran a few April Fool’s articles in the paper, which is something we have done on the first issue in April for quite a few years. Each year we wait to see if we have fooled anyone, if anyone has been offended, if anyone is angry.

It seems that this year, aside from a few teenagers who thought New Moon was being filmed in Frontenac County, and one North Frontenac councilor (who shall remain nameless) who was concerned about the necessity to rename Plevna, most people seem not to have been too badly fooled and some may have even been mildly amused.

We thought we had gotten through the whole thing without offending anyone this year. We also thought there were no implications for us; no angry calls or letters, no offended advertisers. We thought we had gotten away with it this year.

That was until Friday.

On Friday morning we lost Internet access to our office. Service was not down anywhere else that we knew of, so we tried to fix the problem. In doing that, our network became unstable and collapsed. We had no access to our stored files, our office printer, nothing.

We spent a frantic weekend trying to fix a problem that was unlike any we have seen in years, finally cobbling together a wobbly network so we could put the paper together, although in the struggle we seem to have lost most of the emails we received on Friday. This is not a good thing for a community newspaper.

But, networking problems happen.

Coinciding with this, however, I have had a series of unrelated mishaps, with vehicles and on the home front, in recent days. There's been a string of bad luck and bad decisions, leading me to think I may have been jinxed.

I mentioned this to my long time associate Jule Koch, speculating about it being some kind of karmic payback for my passed actions, maybe all those lame April Fool’s jokes, and she said it had nothing to do with karma, the source of my woes was really sin. She could be right.

Be that as it may, on Monday, as I was taking notes on our laptop computer during a meeting, my computer froze up. When I tried to restart it, I got nothing, a black screen. The machine came on, made a sound for about a second, and then sat silently.

Uh oh.

So, if you see me around over the next few days, you might want to walk the other way. Just in case. At the very least, don't let me touch your computer.