Bits & Pieces: When it rains

It started Tuesday afternoon — not literal rain, as suggested by this column’s headline, but in a figurative sense. 

There we were, our hands on two hefty documents we fought to obtain from the county judge’s office: the official Requests for Qualifications as submitted (with financials redacted) by Valor EMS and Pafford EMS. 

One company’s packet had gone through our scanner, and the other had barely started when everything went south. The printer/scanner lost connection with our 12-year-old laptop, and after numerous failed attempts to reconnect, we moved on in search of something else to do. 

Aha: Our counterparts were starting to post to Facebook a big news item out of Fordyce. Knowing precisely where the information came from, we went to the official online source, and saw what no bottom-feeding news blogger wants to lay eyes on: 403 Request Forbidden. Our verbal reaction was akin to dropping the old man’s hubcap containing the tools and lugnuts necessary to repair a flat tire on a cold winter night. 

We called The Spouse, whose tech-savvy ways have helped us out of a jam more times than we’d like to admit. She clicked hither and yon, only to discover that our precious laptop had bitten the dust. It was then that we noticed the charger stopped doing its job.

This, the day after we had told our 11,000 Facebook followers not to rely on Facebook for our news, but to instead visit this website.

The decision was promptly made to order a new computer, and so we did, and in the process cleaned out a savings account. But hey, we’re back, and that’s all our readers care about. If we were anything like the powers behind Wikipedia, we’d point out that, if each of our daily visitors chipped in $1, we could replenish that account plus enough to buy, say, better A/V equipment for our livestreams. Who are we kidding — we’re just as desperate as the Wiki folks. CLICK HERE to make a non-tax-deductible donation to help a poor reporter eat, pay bills and upgrade equipment.

Until the next SNAFU rears its ugly head, Thank You for reading.

Now, back to scanning those RFQs.

Joel Phelps is the publisher of arkadelphian.com. Contact him by e-mail at editor@arkadelphian.com.