By Marcus Traxler
Collegian Sports Editor
11:15 p.m. Tuesday
You know when you envision what it would be like to be without electricity in the 1800s? It’s hard to imagine when you’re constantly connected to the Internet.
Except when you’re not. And you’re a newspaper. And all of your stuff — and I mean all of it — is on the server.
But that is what happened to your favorite college newspaper at 10:30 p.m. on the night of Feb. 28 when the servers in The Union went down. Tuesday is our main production night so the timing was less than ideal. Some of our guesses for why this happened range from a car crashing into a box containing fiber-optic wire to some sort of ice storm disaster to sabotage. I can safely assume that 50 percent of our paper was done or close to being done, but our well-oiled machine hit the skids without warning.
And it was terrible.
Some panicked. Some calmly came up with contingency plans. Some started a crossword puzzle. News Editor Nick Lowrey made plans to break into Yeager Hall's Print Lab to use the hand press they have over there. I bought a smoothie, just beating the Java City 11 p.m. closing.
Right now, Nick is reading through our favorite issues of our peer newspapers, delighting the newsroom like Santa on Christmas morning, except he works here.
Nobody knows what will happen. We’re planning in case we have to print late this week. But we’re hoping the Internet comes back. Soon.
NOTE (11:30 p.m.): We’re back in business. Just a little bump in the road.
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