I’ll start off the week by saying this, if you are reading this column, then the Torch pulled off one of the toughest production days in recent memory.
Let’s flashback to Tuesday, August 31st. The morning I was supposed to send in our PDF files to the Pioneer. As I walked into our office building in Alumni, I noticed something weird. I flipped on a light trying to see in the darkness of the basement, yet the lights didn’t turn on.
Interesting, maybe the university has automatic lights and these switches don’t work. I continued into our office knowing that our light switch would work. Well, it didn’t. It was about this time that I got an email from the University saying power to the Alumni building along with a few other buildings was out.
This put me into a scramble for last weeks edition, in which the library become my office for about four hours while I finished the files and sent them into the Pioneer.
The real fun came when I learned that power to the Alumni building would not be returning anytime soon. I’m fuzzy on the details but I presume trying to maintain a building that is older than my grandparents could have something to do with the issues they are having.
Anyways, because of this, we were left looking for a place to work for this upcoming week of production. At first, the solution seemed simple, we would get to work in the University Center where they had cubicles that we could put the paper together in. The solution seemed easy.
As I was getting the keys, I was informed that the UC would be closing at 6 p.m. on Friday and not re-opening until Tuesday after Labor Day. While that ultimately makes sense, the two days we produce the paper are on Sunday and Monday. So the University Center quickly fell out of favor for this week.
The library was also closed on Monday. Thus, leaving us with no viable option on campus to produce our paper for this week. For a few days, we scrambled trying to figure out what we were going to do. Luckily, our News Editor, Noah Kurkjian offered up his apartment as a possible workplace.
We moved all of our Mac computers to his apartment, but we ran into a multitude of issues revolving around our access to the server. The server allows us to link photos to the drive, find our templates, get to our InDesign files, basically put our paper together. The VPN our school has for off-campus server usage is about as stable as a house of cards that is two stories tall.
Yet, come today, the paper is getting put together by the staff, all huddled together in Noah’s apartment.Graphics being made on one end of the couch, photo’s being uploaded in the kitchen. Design changes being made at the dinner table. The Torch was made in a home this week.
And I’ve been witnessing this from afar. Why? Because COVID decided that it was my turn to go to battle against it. Now, as I type this from my home desk, I’m smiling between coughs because if we can produce a paper in a situation like this, there’s nothing this staff can’t do.
I hope they all get to read this column, because that mean’s we were successful. That mean’s that they accomplished a challenge that none of them have had to face in their career’s here at the Torch.