Sucky days

Most days are exciting, but some are just plain sucky. Today is the latter.

It started off by waking to the sound of the street sweeper and realizing I forgot to move the car off the street. Bingo. $35 ticket. And that was the highlight of the day!

The Talon Marks computer server somehow got damaged over the weekend when the school had a spate of campus computer network troubles and for a while it looked like we were going to lose all data files. Now it looks like only some. And that news comes after a couple of days of the computer folks looking into it.

There was a cascade of other sucky things that happened, but the real downer was when one of the schools scheduled for tomorrow night's high school journalism awards night cancelled on us this morning. And it had to be the school with half the planned attendees. Ouch!

First only a few schools participated in the contests, then two of the four that did aren't coming to the awards presentation. The presentation was our main purpose for investing in the contests: it gets students on our campus. If we can just get them to visit the campus we're confident that long-term relationships will be developed. High schools are a tough nut to crack.

I feel sorry for the instructor. It was the students who baled, not her. We have that same problem with college students at conferences. I've learned tricks over time to counter-act the problem, but she hasn't yet. This is all too new.