While the campus community sees our finished newspapers on Thursday mornings, few are privy to the inner workings and daily happenings of our office.

We have had many reasons to celebrate this year, but there have been a few pretty unfortunate moments, too — some so unfortunate, in fact, we thought it best to share them with everyone.

1. The death of the Otter Chair

Sometime in the late spring of 2013, we came across a desk chair in our office with a missing bolt and a cattywompus lean. Those who sat in the chair were immediately shifted backward with their feet slightly off the ground — they looked like otters floating on their backs. Thus, the Otter Chair was born.

Earlier this semester, our beloved Otter Chair held its final individual, incoming Life Editor Mari Williams. She leaned a little too far back and before we knew it, Mari was in the floor and the chair was lost forever.

2. In memory of…

Staff changes have thrown us off our game at times this year. In August 2013 our copy editor resigned. Before we left for Christmas break our sports editor also resigned. And mid-way through this semester, our adviser of four years accepted an awesome new job in Huntsville.

Some pretty integral parts of our original staff — and our hearts — are forever gone from The Flor-Ala.

3. Parking tickets

It’s no secret that parking is like our campus’ version of the Hunger Games. For those of us who work in Student Media, though, we seem to have a particularly fine knack for finding those lovely blue and white slips of paper flapping in the breeze from our windshields. To the UNA Police Department’s credit, we do often find ourselves sliding into the faculty and staff lot beside our office.

But when you spend as many hours in our office as we do each week, I think we deserve a few spots in the lot to call our own.

4. Opal’s return

When the Student Media staffs resided in a quaint little house on the corner of Irvine Avenue and Seminary Street (you won’t find it now since there’s a parking lot there), there was a friendly office ghost named Opal. Opal hasn’t had much to say since we moved into the old forensic science building behind Willingham Hall, but right around the time we started preparing for our Halloween issue she returned. She took a liking to News Editor Pace Holdbrooks and often made her presence known when he was around.

Creaking noises, weird reflections in computer screens and odd noises from our archive room are just a few of the Opal incidents we’ve encountered this year.

5. The new Civil War

There are four distinct offices in our building: the adviser’s office, The Flor-Ala editor-in-chief and Diorama executive editor’s office, The Flor-Ala editorial staff’s office, and the Diorama and photographers’ office. The main distinction between each room is temperature, and for some reason the office unit can’t seem to be uniform throughout the building.

You start in the adviser’s office — Antarctica — and move through subsequent climates. You eventually end the journey in the Sahara Desert, the Diorama and photographers’ office.

Because each person has a tendency to move the thermostat when they enter the building, we never were quite sure how to dress for the day. And earlier this year, we spent two weeks without air conditioning, aided only by the two dozen fans we flooded our office with.

6. The office supplies shortage

No matter how hard we tried this year, there were never enough Post-It notes. Maybe it was Opal trying to get our attention or a sneaky squirrel thief, but one day we had an entire box and the next day we didn’t (same scenario with the Pop-Tarts we got earlier this year).

7. Server problems

We have a computer server that stores and saves every bit of work we complete. It is quite literally our lifeline in this office, and we’ve come to have a love-hate relationship with it.

It grew to have a mind of its own and we went almost three weeks with saving finished pages, stories and data to external hard drives. Tensions ran high and stress was abundant, but we emerged on the other side of the battle triumphant (until the next time it decides to malfunction).