Friday for, I think the third time recently, the internet went out at work. It is in those moments that I realize just how dependent I’ve become on the internet in my daily life.

As we are working to put together the newspaper, the internet being out severely handicaps us at times. We are dependent on our email to receive obits, press releases, and to get questions answered for things like photo identifications.

When the internet goes out we also lose our phones, which contributes to the difficulties. As we scramble around to make do (we still have internet on our cellphones, but isn’t enough!!!)we have to try different things. We hotspot with our phones to get into our emails quickly enough to get what we need. It definitely slows us down. With our small newsroom staff we all have to wear multiple hats and when something that we depend on so much goes down it throws everything out of whack.

I can’t imagine how they used to put the paper together without all the tools that we have. We design the paper on the computer, take photos on a digital card, then we can just upload straight to the page and miraculously edit.

When the Hurricane came through a couple weeks ago we were without internet for most of the day and had been afraid that we might lose power. That is when I learned something pretty interesting. In all the years that Mark Pope has run the press here, he has never missed a print.

That gave me hope that we could overcome. Losing the internet for most of a day seemed a trivial complaint when they used to have to lay out the paper by hand and develop pictures that they didn’t know if they had turned out well or not. Now I can do it on the computer, fix my bad photos (or retake them after looking at the screen and knowing how bad they are).

We have definitely become dependent on the technology, but I’ll take the occasional glitch and setback over having to go back to the old ways of doing it by hand.