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Dear God: a SooToday.com Camp Call

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is a Camp Call to the Head Wizard of SooToday.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is a Camp Call to the Head Wizard of SooToday.com's IT Department, who's decided to spend a couple of days with his staff at the No-Phones Lodge, a place of incomparable beauty located on Algoma's scenic and secluded Lake-That-Has-No-Lights.

Of course, our technical staff only does this one weekend a year.

Of course, all hell breaks loose every year when they do.

Until our Supreme Deity of IT blesses us with His Presence, our E-mail service is down.

If you have important news that you really need to get to SooToday.com, stuff that can't wait until Monday, don't E-mail us.

Either fax us at 705-942-1017 or phone us at 941-0664.

If you E-mailed us anything since around 9 p.m. Friday, chances are we haven't seen it.

We expect our crack technical department will read the following Camp Call message on their wireless laptop and will have everything restored to normal before the end of the weekend.

******************* To the head of SooToday.com's technical staff:

Dear God:

I know you and your IT under-deities have generally tried to avoid me ever since I plugged my coffeemaker into SooToday.com's Ethernet hub.

I really regret having done that.

The coffeemaker hasn't worked right ever since, even though I've been powering it directly from the UPS to ensure a reliable source of electricity.

I know sometimes I've bothered Your Excellencies about stuff that turned out to be stupid or less than important.

I mean, I didn't purposely spill my Gourmet Swiss Muesli into the cereal port.

And I'm really sorry about phoning you at 2 a.m. to find out where my computer's 'Any' key was located. The error message clearly said I was to press 'Any' key. What else could I do?

But this time I really have a problem: My browser is no longer downloading SooToday.com's E-mail.

I've spent most of Saturday trying to solve it myself and I'm just going deeper and deeper down a spider-hole of missing .dll files and "Re-install Microsoft Office" advisories.

I know it's all my fault because I've fought you for months on replacing this clunker of a computer.

I've been living (and sleeping) with her for so long that we've become fast friends.

In recent weeks, however, she's been belching and spewing and hiccuping and expectorating data with such regularity that I've come to agree with you.

It's time to turn this old girl in for one of those sleeker, younger models.

Please make the necessary arrangements without delay.

This is kind of like pulling off an old Band-Aid. Speed is everything.

My only request is that the old machine be treated with appropriate dignity.

After all, SooToday.com News was birthed in her once-loamy loins.

I fully expect that when we finally take down Bill Gates and achieve our objective of Internet World Domination, she'll become the centrepiece of some Museum of Community Web Journalism.

I'm picturing a prestigious research institution housed in our old site next to what used to be the downtown bingo, with white-gloved conservators lovingly spilling Chinese herbal cola and organic tortilla and papaya fragments into her keyboard, and tossing paper clips into her printer, to restore everything to its original condition.

But for today, God, I'll gladly settle for some help in restoring our E-mail service.

Please reply soonest,

- David Helwig, SooToday.com News


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David Helwig

About the Author: David Helwig

David Helwig's journalism career spans seven decades beginning in the 1960s. His work has been recognized with national and international awards.
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