Tech troubles test tolerance

This week has been a technical nightmare that continues into the final preparations of this newspaper being sent to press.

My routine for the last several elections has been to tune in to the Parker County Elections election updates website and pass on pertinent information on our Facebook page.

Unfortunately, well into the night, the page showed zero results. I kept refreshing, and it kept showing zero. I even restarted my browser, but it still showed zero, so my assumption was that there was a problem at the county elections office.

Unknown to me, the website had been updating, just not on my computer, so when I called the elections office to ask when results would be posted, they assumed Iwas asking about all results, and said they were still working on it.

Only well after 11 p.m., when others were letting me know how the local elections went, did I restart my computer and see the results for myself.

In the mean time, I have this thing about only posting official results, so as I was posting the 7% or so of precincts reporting in Texas, the networks were already projecting the winners in statewide races.

I definitely need to figure out who they are plugged into to be able to get results faster than the State of Texas.

Fast forward to the day after the election, and internet and cell service goes out that afternoon. We didn’t know at the time the extent of the outage — only that there was no way to check and see if we forgot to pay our cellular bill.

Because everything we do here is cloud-based, we were dead in the water. The only version of any file we had was only on the computer of the last person who edited or saved it.

We finally had the bright idea of getting everything we needed on a thumb drive, and I took it home, where internet is working, to finish the paper. As I type it is an hour and a half past our press deadline, so we’re not sure you will receive your printed newspaper on time, but you’ll get it sooner (we hope) or later!