Readers have been calling this morning to ask us, “What happened to Taylor Made, Taylor Ivy’s lively column published each Friday on the Panola People page. Her April 16th column, “Rude behavior encountered in parking lot” began as usual on the Panola People page and was “jumped” — continued on page B10. That was the plan.

But when April 16 readers turned to page B10, there was no continuation, only a full page advertisement promoting use of The Panolian classified ads.

What happened was a critical breakdown during the production of Friday’s print edition that forced us to call on our friends at The Oxford Eagle to produce the negatives we need to make our printing plates. The device that failed us takes the electronic data composed in computers to look like newspaper pages and turns it into negatives that look like the reverse image of a newspaper page.

Or something like that. Anyway, the device quit.

The Eagle came to our rescue as they have in times past, but printing was delayed some hours by the adjustments and transportation. In the shuffle, the negative for the real page B10 got left behind.

Tripp Pepper, our pre-press guru discovered the omission as he assembled negatives to burn plates. He quickly substituted the negative for an old page, and plate-burning proceeded. It was late and getting later by then. Our press and mailing crews had waited for some hours and would patiently more until they had finished everything necessary to get your Friday paper to you.

But it would be without the rest of Taylor Made, without a report on Mary Edna Pitcock’s 95th birthday coming up April 18, without the usual Friday church calendar and without an ad announcing First United Church’s observation of National Women’s History Month on April 16.

You’ll find Taylor Made in its entirety on this web site and in Tuesday’s print edition.

We’re attempting to work through our equipment failure. We appreciate our workers who worked so long to get your Friday paper to you. And we appreciate the patience of many readers, some of whom have made several trips through our parking lot on Highway 51Thursday night to see if Friday’s edition had yet appeared in the newsstand.

Meanwhile it was only on Friday that we discovered while reading The Oxford Eagle web site that they also had problems on Thursday while we were having our problems. Their Thursday edition was delayed by several hours as was our Friday edition. They never mentioned their problems while helping us with ours.