This has been the best day all week. Although I can not begin ot describe how frustrated I've been ever since Tuesday, I am fine now. This is my story:
I am the copy editor for my school paper. We spent five nights last week laying out our June issue. It was honestly the most proffessionally done issue we had produced all year. We arrived on Tuesday morning to add the final touches, and ship ot to the printer, when we discovered that someone had deleted our entire layout. At first we thought that it may have been an accident, but someone had to drag each page of layout to the trash, and then empty the trash. We knew that someone had discovered our password, and they wee out to ruin us.
We still had the final copies of all the articles, they just weren't laid out. We immediately changed our password, and notified the staff. Roughly twenty minutes after we made this announcement, the entire folder was deleted along with the articles, all of our templates, and the layouts for every issue we have done for the past five years. Our paper was essentially destroyed, but worst of all, we knew that it was an inside job. Someone who we thought that we could trust enough to work with us had destroyed all our hard work.
We could have given up, but we took the back-up copies of all the articles, and started over, with another password. Only the two co-editors-in-chief know this password; no one trusts anyone else. I feel violated that someone would do this to us, yet what hurts the most is knowing that the culprit has not been found, and that the trust that existed on our staff has been ruined for some time to come. Yet, in many ways, this incident reassures me. I know that this is "the issue that will not die." I have complete faith in the 2001-2002 editorial staff of which I am a part; and I know that after we completed the layout process again, that we have what it takes to make the paper great again.
I have been waking up at 4:30 every morning this week since I found out. The thought of another week of layout was not at all appealing. On top of that, finals are next week, and I take the SAT IIs tomorrow. But I woke up this morning (at 4:30 again) and listened to The Who and Led Zeppelin, and I just sat there in the dark with my headphones on, knowing that this was the end of a long week, but that I had survived, and that summer is on its way.