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Amanda Apolonia Waligun and William Augustine Grabinski engagement

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Lindsay Kasper and James Gill were united in marriage

<p>Our press is broken. And that&#8217;s a big problem.</p><p>It&#8217;s as big a problem for us as your oven shutting down on Thanksgiving Day would be for you.</p><p>Or your washing machine refusing to spin the dirt out of your son&#8217;s Little League uniform after he slid into home plate.</p><p>Or your dishwasher not emptying after you&#8217;ve fed your daughter and her family of seven.</p><p>Yep. It&#8217;s a big problem.</p><p>We are working diligently not only to solve the problem but to deal with the problems a broken press creates.</p><p>Like diagnosticians in the largest hospital in the country, our specially-trained people are looking for the problem. Finding the problem is the biggest problem. Fixing it comes next.</p><p>We&#8217;ve managed to secure press time (a valuable commodity in this industry) off-site and are trucking our product back to Wilkes-Barre for delivery. But it takes time to drive back to our production facility to prepare the newspaper for delivery.</p><p>Thus, our news is not as late-breaking as we&#8217;d like it to be. That&#8217;s where our website comes in. As always, you can log onto www.timesleader.com for the latest-breaking news.</p><p>Then comes the delivery issue. Some of our carries have full-time day jobs and, if our newspaper is not available to them at a certain time, they can&#8217;t get all their papers delivered before reporting to those jobs.</p><p>That&#8217;s when our district managers step in. They&#8217;re taxed with the responsibility of delivering the papers the carriers can&#8217;t.</p><p>There are only so many people to go around.</p><p>I recently reported for jury duty where I sat in the Luzerne County Courthouse doing absolutely nothing for two days. I couldn&#8217;t help but wonder what it would be like at the Times Leader if we had a room full of 200 people, just waiting for something to do. Boy, could we put them to work now!</p><p>What we are not doing is ignoring the problem.</p><p>Our customer service reps have been working around the clock, answering phone calls as quickly as they possibly can. When the customer service phone long is busy, subscribers go down the list of managers - publisher, executive editor, managing editor, advertising director, circulation director, production manager. We&#8217;ve all gotten phone calls.</p><p>I get it. I&#8217;m one of those people whose day is absolutely ruined if my newspaper is not on the front porch when I get up in the morning.</p><p>We&#8217;re doing everything humanly possible to make the best of a bad situation. Just like you would do if your oven broke on Thanksgiving Day, or your washing machine broke after a Little League game or your dishwasher broke during a load of scummy dishes.</p><p>We - every one of us here at the Times Leader - apologize for this situation. None of us did anything to create it and all of us would prefer to have a press that never breaks. But, for as vulnerable as you are when you depend on household appliances, that&#8217;s how vulnerable we are with our press. There is never a good time for any of these things to break.</p><p>We&#8217;re working hard. We&#8217;re working overtime. We&#8217;re doing everything we can to rectify this situation. Please bear with us. As my mother used to say - this hurts us more than it hurts you.</p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Dotty Martin is the managing editor of the Times Leader. Reach her at dmartin@www.timesleader.com or 570-704-3982.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Beyond the Byline: A broken press hurts us more than it hurts you