My computer started acting up Monday.
As far as I'm concerned, it acts up every day, but when the terminal screen turns black, shortly after sending an alien message, I know I'm in for fun.
That's not exactly what I was thinking.
When the computer acts up on our press day – we send most of our pages to the Houston printer on Monday – it's anxiety central.
Pages 1 and 2 are sent early Tuesday morning.
So when the computer acts up Monday, that stalls the whole process.
Fortunately, Jessica, our on-the-spot IT person, got things working again.
She didn't use my celebrated and often criticized vocabulary and special incantations, but she got the ship righted again.
In the early days of newsroom computers in the 1980s, I was the managing editor of the Kerrville Daily Times.
I learned early in my newspaper career that on smaller papers, the title of editor isn't confined to assigning stories and editing them.
No, my publisher Bill Dozier, who actually was a lot kinder than other bosses I would later encounter, decided to send me to Wichita, Kan., to learn about fixing computers.
There I would spend an entire week at the headquarters of MicroTek.
Early business and certainly newspapers computers were far different compared to now.
My training included changing out the boards inside the machines.
It was a total nightmare for me.
But I had no choice. I finished the program and flew back to Texas as an editor/computer repairman.
Well, that resume item was tested not long after that intensive training.
The famed writer James Michener was working on his novel “Texas” and spent a few days in Kerrville as part of his research on our great state.
I sent my main reporter Edd O'Donnell to interview him.
Edd was a journeyman reporter and a great storyteller in his own right and spent hours with Michener.
So, one evening as Edd is finishing his story on Michener's travels around Texas, I hear a giant scream from the 6-foot-five-inch reporter who weighed about 300 pounds.
Somehow the computer ate all of the 3,000-plus words that O'Donnell had typed.
In my mind, I wanted to take a bat to Edd's computer, but I tried to fathom what happened.
That particular lesson wasn't taught at Wichita, Kan.
Edd wanted me to do something to bring the story back.
I tried everything I could think of, to no avail.
Edd rewrote part of his story, Dozier later ended up buying newer computers, and I lobbied successfully to be scrubbed as the IT guy.
Edd talked about that day to his death, which happened earlier this year.
