Mile High Comics News

Howdy!

It has been eight days since I last wrote to you. This exceptionally long absence was the direct result of a nightmarish series of computer difficulties that have kept all of our internal operating systems out of commission. Simply put, without our main computer functioning we could not invoice any back issue or new comics subscription orders, nor could we add or delete inventory. Never in our 44-year history as a company has such a systemwide disaster struck us.

If you are wondering how such a catastrophic event could occur, the answer is that it was actually about six highly unlikely events that linked themselves together. It began when our main computer started acting up a week ago, Friday. After attempts to reboot our old system then failed to resolve the problems, we decided to switch all of our data to our back up system. To our dismay, our back up system then failed to boot up. We then ordered two more units be shipped in overnight by FedEx from a Canadian supplier. That strategy seemed to work perfectly until the US Customs department placed a hold on our shipment when it arrived in Memphis, costing us two more days of down time. Then, just when we thought things could not get any worse, neither of those newly-arrived Canadian systems would boot up, either. Arrgh!

After a second weekend of diligent testing and effort by our Colorado tech team failed to resolve the problem, the decision that I reached on Sunday afternoon was to box up our original unit, plus one of new machines, and to personally fly them to the headquarters of our tech support team near Detroit, Michigan. I left Denver late on Sunday night in an icy Spring snowstorm, arriving in Detroit at 3 AM. After a quick catnap and shower, I had both machines in the hands of our experts at 7:30 AM.

Nothing came of their testing efforts until three hours later, when one of our circuits on one of our brand new replacement circuit boards (which we had repeatedly tested...) suddenly began smoking, glowed cherry red, and melted into a puddle. While that startled the heck out of us all, it turned out to be the key. Our techs had a replacement board sitting on a shelf, which when installed, worked perfectly. Our new machine then booted up instantly, which allowed us to begin loading the 18,000+ files from our back-up.

I wish that were the end of the story, but yet another glitch occurred six hours later. It turned out that there was a very slight incompatibility between the metal frames of our old machine and our new machine that kept the external ports from working. We quickly resolved that difficulty by switching everything back into our old box, but by then I had missed my return flight back to Colorado. I finally arrived back at the Mile High Comics headquarters at 9 AM yesterday morning, after catching a 6 AM flight out of Detroit. All told, I had a total of six hours sleep in three days...

The good news is that all of our capabilities are now completely restored. Our incredibly hardworking Vice President of Operations, William Murakami, stayed at our warehouse invoicing orders until 1 AM this morning, and also set up all of our invoicing for today's new comics subscription accounts. We are now going to have to work down a considerable backlog, but that should go relatively quickly now that we now have all of our systems up and running again. Even better news is that our Detroit technical team had some excellent options to offer us for improving the overall speed of our systems, at very little cost. Just as soon as we get caught up with our present backlog, we plan to avail ourselves of those wonderful new options.

I will close today's newsletter by simply passing on to you that this crazy series of calamities has been an extremely humbling experience for me. I have always taken pride in our having backups to our backups, and to always exercising extreme caution. No amount of advance planning can take into account every possibility, however, so sometimes you just have to realize that we are never actually in control of what happens in our lives. All that we can do is to try to plan as best we can, and then hope that everything turns out well. It ultimately did in this case, but not before scaring all of us half to death.

Happy Collecting!

Chuck Rozanski,
President - Mile High Comics, Inc.
May 14, 2014

P.S. I will write another newsletter tomorrow, in which I will catch you up on all of the very good things that we accomplished during the week while our computers were down. In the meantime, below is our preliminary cover to our upcoming DEADPOOL variant that we are creating for release in conjunction with our June 12th Denver Comic-Con party. We are accepting a limited number of advance orders for this cool variant at $14.95 each via Greg or Mario in our new comics subscription department. You can call them at 303-455-2659, or write to them at nice@milehighcomics.com. Limit five copies per client, please.


Deadpool #30
Mile High/Denver Comic Con Cover

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