Boy do I remember this story, but not for the reasons you might think. It nearly got me fired. 

I remember how it started - in the men's room, of all places. I rarely took a lunch break but this day there wasn't much going on, so I left the newsroom for about 15 minutes to grab a bite and then went into the john. One of the station's reporters came in as I was washing my hands and asked me, "what are you doing here?" 

"What do you mean?" I asked him, confused.

"Didn't you hear about the plane crash at Pearson?" 

"What!!!" I thought he was joking just to get me started. But he wasn't. I rushed back into a newsroom that had exploded into action, and went back to my post, which that day was writing copy for the station's very successful website. 

I wrote a quick story and then tried to put it up online. But something had glitched in our publishing engine and try as I might - and I did at least 50 times - I could not get the thing to work. For some reason, it picked that moment to go down. Other stations already had the story up and we were stuck with an old and fairly benign lead headline on our home page about something else. 

I phoned IT and engineering and demanded they fix this immediately. I can get very competitive at work and we were getting absolutely clobbered by everyone else. But try as they might, they simply could not bring the program back up. We began to get a flood of emails from viewers asking where the plane crash story was and letting me know every other news site had the breaking news. Didn't we know what was going on? They wanted to know how we could have missed it!

I couldn't reply to them and put the pressure on the engineers to do something -  anything! This was a breaking story around the world and everyone had it but us, the city where it happened! It made us look like idiots. (And trust me, I didn't need the help in that department!) The longer this went on, the more enraged I got. 

In fact, I got so angry I started to yell at people out of extreme frustration, which was not like me. Eventually, my boss told me to calm down or they'd have to talk about suspension or even firing for cause. That finally brought me back to my senses and I became used to the idea that we were just going to get our asses kicked this time. 

And we did.

Eventually, the publishing engine came back up, perhaps an hour after the crash, while I sat there fuming. I put up my story, which by then had been updated and life returned to normal. 

So that's why that crash stands out for me. Miraculously, no one lost their lives - and no one lost their job! But it was a close call for all of us!

I lost it that day for sure. Not something I often do, but the pressure to get this story out was intense - and there was nothing I could do as we got our asses kicked by everyone else. I don't think I'd react like that today, but hopefully we'll never find out!