Last Thursday Seven Days weathered an internet storm. It was a local problem — a physical outage at a Chittenden County data center with a server that hosts our company’s domain name. Geek-speak translation: bad news for Seven Days and a mess of other companies and organizations, including Vermont Public. For 10 hours our website was down, and none of us could send or receive emails; the outage also affected our internet-based office phone system. Without warning, in a blackout totally unrelated to meteorology or spy balloons, the digital connections to our readers simply disappeared.
We could talk to each other, though: Like many companies, we use the instant messaging app Slack for internal communications, and our office-wide group chat was abuzz with queries from anxious reporters, editors and advertising staff. Fielding them was Don Eggert, our creative director, associate publisher and in-house “IT guy.” Calm and collected, at least in writing, he explained the problem in understandable language and dispensed sensible advice like: “You may also not be able to connect to the office server remotely. Come on in if you can! The server works fine in the office.”
For the past quarter century, Don has led Seven Days through the digital revolution. Guided by beauty and functionality, he designed the front and back ends of our local media company. He is the man behind the curtain, monitoring how our readers interact with our paper and digital products. It may be no coincidence that he shares a central New York birthplace with L. Frank Baum, the guy who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
In truth, the masthead is not big enough to list all the jobs Don does. They include fixing and maintaining our computers — all 49 of them. The night we went dark, Don was working on mine, installing a new operating system. And the cool new rug in the office — the one that ties our newsroom together? That was picked by Don the decorator.
Don came to Vermont to attend Middlebury College, just like I did, though he arrived almost 20 years later. I studied French and Italian; he chose Russian, spending a year in Moscow.
He didn’t get any formal training in design. He picked that up on his own, along with his digital expertise. Don keeps an eye on what’s trending, both in the culture and in the media industry. He’s the one who pushed to get Seven Days content online in 2000. And he’s guided us through many tech transitions, methodically mapping out what it’ll take to move from one platform to another with as little disruption, and expense, as possible.
Often his solutions involve a DIY element: Like most of us at Seven Days, Don likes to fix things himself. That’s true outside of work, too. He’s the handyman at home in Winooski. When he saw that the state’s LGBTQ community needed a gathering spot, he helped build what is now the Pride Center of Vermont. Sitting around last week waiting for unseen engineers to pull a switch to get Seven Days back online was excruciating for him, especially as the problem stretched late into the evening.
As one of our employee-owners, Don understands that his is not a nine-to-five gig. At 10:30 p.m., he let all of us know via Slack that the website was back up and our emails would soon be restored. By 11, he’d drafted a notice to alert readers to the outage and put it up on the site. After he got some sleep, he started planning to make sure it never happens again.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2023.
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