The Curious Case of the Corrupt File

It was somewhere around 8 p.m. that I really started to lose my stuff. If you take your tongue, stick it through your teeth, clamp down a bit and blow, you will recreate the sound that I have been making for the past five hours...."PFFFFFFFFFFFFFTPT!"

"PFFFFFFFFFFFFFTPT!"

"PFFFFFFFFFFFFFTPT!"

It is the lone sound that hasn't been a profane utterance that I have voiced since at least 6 p.m.

Aloha, Gang, Mark here. I am on hour number 15 of work on Monday, getting the PCN put to bed. It has been a long day, folks, and I am here to explain why the paper looks sort of different this week and to apologize to some people.

My madness started at precisely 3:41 p.m. when I went to save the document that housed the first, dare I say better, edition of this week's paper. Nearly complete, it was chock-full of words, pictures and all the other goodies normally associated with Your Community Newspaper. But I must have made the news gods unhappy at some point and the program I use to make the paper —Adobe InDesign — went down.

Done.

Closed.

Forever.

My file somehow became corrupt when InDesign crashed and with it went all the day's progress which included all the Correspondent News, a nifty 1,300-word story penned by Don Voegel about driving his car through the ice at Nelson years ago, Briefly items, the Senior Menu, you name it, I lost it.

"PFFFFFFFFFFFFFTPT!"

After tinkering with the corrupt file for nearly two hours — right around quitting time — I decided it was time to bite the bullet and rebuild this week's paper...no easy feat. With the rebuild comes the loss of two pages of content, namely a story about the local Red Hatters and the other about the Art Fair held this past Sunday.

To the Red Hatters and to all the artists I interviewed, my sincerest apologies. People should know of your doings last week and, unfortunately, I had to drop the ball. I leave for Rochester, Minnesota's Mayo Clinic next week to have the old hood popped open to get my ticker working again. When I get back to functioning correctly, I hope I can make up this week's blunder.

Aloha and Mahalo.

Mark