Interesting start to the day

Tuesday is a late work night for our reporters. Often the evening sees them at school board meetings, or taking in hockey, basketball and volleyball competitions. Then they return to the newspaper to write about what transpired earlier.
In addition, they put the news in the sports and district sections of the newspaper.
The power outage shortly before six last evening began putting them behind schedule. It also caused some other problems with our computers. The laying out of the paper begins around that time and often we see our reporters completing their stories from Monday and Tuesday late in the afternoon and into the early evening.
On Tuesday, the power failure had them scrambling. The writing software that the newspaper has, automatically backs up stories every few seconds. No one lost much in the way of writing. But their train of thought and flow of words were interrupted.
As most businesses, we fear power outages. They have created havoc with our computers in the past and even though we have power back-up systems to keep computers up and running, a power bump can sometimes cause computers to “hiccup.”
Last evening was no different. I came down to make sure everything was operating correctly. Initially the CP news system was having a difficult time communicating with our internal system and after a call to Toronto, and some instructions we were able to get it back up and operating.
The other parts of our system appeared to be functioning
However, it wasn’t until Wednesday morning that we discovered that the power outage had caused the database of our accounts receivable system to close. It appeared that everything had been lost.
We also discovered that the second server was not “talking” to the computers hooked up to it.
That left us scrambling.
As the staff began arriving this morning, the first instruction they were issued was to not turn on their computers. It sounded strange to them.
The servers only required restarting to allow them to perform the automatic internal checks on their data. A call was made to Michigan to talk to the software technicians of our software who helped us bring back the databases.
We were late in starting to put together the front section of the paper. But by 8:45 a.m., everything was operating normally.
We still have some checking to do to determine why even with power filters and automatic battery back-up the servers had the hiccups. It did make for an interesting start to the day.