Trying to come up with a Plan B (02/13/08)

You know you're in trouble when your day goes south before you even reach the office.

As I turned from Pleasant Street onto West Main, I saw the truck from Franklin's Electrical Service parked in front of the building.

Greg Franklin had been there the day before, but it wasn't a good sign to see him there a second day. We'd been having some problems with the control panel on the Goss Community press that prints The CR, The News and Sun, The Circulator, The Berne Tri-Weekly News, and a few other jobs now and then.

On Wednesday, we thought the problems had been solved.

On Thursday, when I saw Greg's truck, I knew that we weren't yet out of the woods.

My mood didn't improve in the pressroom. Greg was making progress in troubleshooting the situation, but it wasn't clear he'd be able to work his usual miracles by presstime.

I went looking for Plan B.

Back in 2005, during the ice storm, my boyhood friend Frank Snyder, publisher of The Daily Standard in Celina, had bailed us out. We've known each other most of our lives; my father was a friend of Frank's dad, Parker.

So that's who I called.

We spent a few minutes working on the details of how we might be able to pull things off so that the readers would never know we'd run into difficulty, then I wandered back into the job shop - our commercial printing department, if you want to get fancy - to alert Carl to what's going on. Carl Ronald is both my cousin and our head of commercial printing. He's also a pretty smart cookie when it comes to figuring out how to work around a sudden complication, just the guy with whom to discuss Plan B.

Carl was running a press when the conversation started, but by the time we were done he had shut it down.

"I want to show you something," he said.

We walked over to the second story windows on the west side of the building.

"Take a look at that," he said.

There was a brick. No, there were two bricks. They sat upon the metal roof over the building's loading dock. There was only one place they could have come from: The building itself.

Carl said he'd check it out when he went outside for a cigarette. I don't smoke, so I didn't wait.

Within seconds, it was clear what had happened. High winds had gotten under the metal cap for the rubber membrane roof, lifting it up.

And when they did, the force pulled some of the parapet wall at the fourth floor level back and away. Two bricks had fallen. Others teetered. And the rubber membrane had clearly been damaged.

Perfect, I thought. It's a publisher's tri-fecta. The press won't run. The roof is damaged. And bricks are falling off the wall.

I wondered what was next: A computer crash or a libel suit?

What happened next was one of those scenarios that reminds me why I love living in a small town.

First, Greg Franklin got a handle on our press problems. We're still not completely out of the woods, and we have a press control specialist stopping in this week. But thanks to having a first-rate commercial electrical service on hand, the press is running and the situation is under control.

The roof and wall were another story. After checking with Portland Insurance, I went looking for Roger Inman of Inman Roofing.

I did that, of course, at the offices of The Portland Foundation, where Roger and Bev's son Doug is executive director.

Doug raised Roger on his cell phone and recommended his brother-in-law Dave Hemmelgarn to handle the brickwork.

By the end of the day, I'd traveled from anxiety and despair to a level of confidence and assurance.

We'll get the press control panel issues resolved. We'll get the brickwork back in shape. And we'll get the roof repaired.

And with any luck, the next few times I make the turn from Pleasant onto West Main, the only thing I'll have to worry about is traffic.

Life - despite its never-ending surprises - continues to be good.

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