Power failure writer’s alibi for no column

Blame the Snow Queen and the power company for no column last week. The thing was, there was no electricity in these parts for three days, which because of my dependency on it thwarted any efforts at filling this space.

My excuses to the editor sounded like Dr. Seuss:

I could not send it through e-mail, I could not send it, I did wail. I could not call you on the phone, I have remotes, she heard me moan. I could not send it via fax, (it wasn’t written; I’d been lax).

There was a time this wouldn’t have happened, not with the heavy, black Royal typewriter and hand-delivery of hard copy that old men on Linotype machines would then reproduce in lead letters. Hot type, they called it, as they worked with galleys and trays, presses and wrenches.

In the 1960s, the modern technology used to automatically relay news stories way across to another state was through Western Union telegraph wires, the same system my mama employed to send $50 in cash once when I was broke in California.

Few advancements had been made by the early ’70s, when I was a short-lived stringer for Time magazine, which asked me to “wire” the Atlanta bureau a news brief about the Mississippi Legislature stirring up the hive, I concluded, of the local beekeepers association.

Seems the lawmakers were considering some sort of foolish regulations that would rob the association’s financial honeycomb. The Capitol was abuzz the whole week, I wrote, while some solons waxed on and on about the necessity for legislation. It wasn’t long before the beekeepers – a strong lobby – swarmed the place … and took the sting out of the bill.

In another job – soon thereafter, for obvious reasons – the only means by which a newspaper reporter could file an out-of-town story by deadline was by pay telephones. That meant dictating it to the unlucky soul who picked up the phone in the newsroom and spent the next 40 minutes typing while cradling the receiver between his chin and shoulder, an exercise that could land him in traction.

Then came the dinosaurs of computers, the TRS-80s, which obliterated more words than captured them, all because of a single slip on the keyboard or a power outage lasting no longer than an eye-blink. Writers held their breaths, though few, their tongues. It wasn’t long before word processors got fancier and faster.

And now, with sophisticated equipment, reporters tap away on laptops, chronicling meetings and recording quotes, and with the click of a mouse, sending their stories miles away, into the electronic arms of some motherboard.

That’s all well and good until a wintry storm fells trees, which down transmission lines, which cause blackouts. And which prevent columnists from otherwise being empowered.