Have you ever had one of those days?

You know the kind I’m talking about. A day when, out of the blue, complete and total hell breaks loose and all you can do is stand helplessly aside watching the chaos unravel everything in its path.

Well, Tuesday night, or Black Tuesday, as we at the Daily have affectionately called it, was one of those days.

A lot of things went wrong that night. We pulled a lot of hair from heads, we used about every word in the book to curse computers and technology and we at one point thought the Daily was not going to get published.

If you happened to pick up a Daily yesterday, then you know what I’m talking about. There were a few — interesting, shall we call them — changes in that edition which have raised some eyebrows and about a million questions.

The most noticeable of these changes was the front page of the paper, which had neither color photographs or fonts, nor actual news stories. (Not that a Cyclone win isn’t news, it’s just not the type of news we usually run on page one.)

There were also some oddly placed advertisements on the opinion pages that took the place of our staff editorials. And for those English buffs out there, you might have noticed there were quite a few pages that did not get copy-edited. The upside of that: for once we had a legitimate excuse for those misspelled words and dangling participles.

So, to answer yesterday’s most frequently asked question — What happened last night? — let me explain why Dec. 3 will forever be remembered as Black Tuesday at the Daily.

It all started as a regular night at the student newspaper office. Most of the editors had just finished editing and placing stories and photographs on their pages.

We knew the sports page would be late because there was a home basketball game that night. We weren’t worried, though — we had plenty of time, or so we thought.

Just so you know, the Daily is not printed here on campus, which is why we have to be sure to meet our 11 p.m. deadline each night.

All stories, copy-editing, layout and paste-up must be finished by then so a dummy copy of the Daily can be picked up by a guy who takes it to Webster City to be printed. Once it’s printed, it’s delivered to the Daily office early in the morning so the paper carriers can deliver it.

Anyway, at about 8:30, I had just finished laying out pages one and two. I left my desk for about two minutes.

At approximately that same time, unbeknownst to all of us, a computer somewhere in Hamilton Hall, where the Daily is located, started sending out some bad signals to the university Ethernet network.

The Daily is very dependent on this system, because it keeps all of our computers connected so we can use the same program and publish the paper. These bad signals, according to an ADP representative for the university, caused Hamilton Hall to lose its server connection. This in turn, crippled the Daily because we could not access any of our files.

It was only hen I returned to my desk a few minutes later that the chaos came raining down on us.

Computers all over the office started crashing. It was taking 15 minutes just to reboot a computer, only to have it crash again when we tried to do something.

Something was not quite right in the land of the Daily. I tried to open pages one and two, only to have my computer tell me “system failure.” Things were not cool.

After several hours of pacing and worrying, our computer guru, Curt, came up with a genius plan that somehow allowed us to print out most of our pages. I’d tell you what he did, but I honestly don’t have a clue.

All I can say is once he got done with the production room it looked as though a war had taken place. Cords and wires snaked around our ankles, computers were disassembled and laying on the floor, paper was thrown everywhere, but the pages were printing out. Granted it was about midnight, an hour past our deadline, but hey, we were going to have a paper.

Unfortunately, though, the front page was never retrievable. It is still a mystery as to why both the regular file and the back-up file could not be retrieved. For this reason, we made a last-minute decision to run the sports pages on page one and two, and delete two pages of the paper.

We couldn’t recreate the pages because we still were not able to use the news server where the stories were located. So most of the stories that should have appeared on page one are on it today.

So, my friends, that is the story of Black Tuesday.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. And I thank my entire staff of editors who so loyally stayed on the sinking ship.

By the way, at 2 p.m. yesterday, there wasn’t a Daily to be found on this side of campus. I think it might just be the most popular issue of the year, so hold on to it.

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Keesia Wirt is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Panora. She is editor in chief of the Daily.