Technology is great and all, but only when it works.

That’s something we discovered here at the office last week, starting about an hour after newspapers hit driveways and continuing on into the weekend.

It turns out that a handful of letters to the editor did not make it to us last week and, unfortunately, the only answer we can offer is that the internet, in all its untold power, chose to eat them.

All told, we had about seven or eight individuals contact us about letters that did not run in the Aug. 24 issue. We have one or two slip through the cracks from time to time, but never on this scale. That tipped us to the fact that something had gone pretty wrong on the technology side of things.

Unfortunately, there’s no way for either party involved to know there is an issue until the paper comes out and someone notices that their letter did not run. If a letter gets eaten by the internet, neither the sender nor the intended recipient is notified that anything went wrong.

For letters sent through our website, senders should receive an automatic response stating that the letter has gone through. Even, then, though, there may be a combination of words in said letter that our spam filter isn’t too fond of and decides to catch in its net.

Going forward, I will do my best to respond to every letter sent to ryan@fhtimes.com with a note saying, bare minimum, “received.” If you send a letter my way and you do not receive that response, feel free to send it again or give me a call.

I want to be sure everyone has the chance to offer their two cents in these pages, so hopefully this will help cut down on any missed letters while we figure out what, exactly, went wrong last week.

As an added bonus, this all happened the final week before the Aug. 30 election, which isn’t the greatest timing for a technological snafu to perform a disappearing act on more than half a dozen letters. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience.

What’s interesting to note is that I received some pretty curious accusations as a result. I had one person tell me I was clearly favoring one candidate because I chose not to run their letter, followed by another writer stating that I clearly sided with the other candidate because their letter had gone un-published.

I think if you look back over the past two months’ worth of letters, you’ll see we ran pretty much anything and everything for or against all candidates. We’re not in the business of stifling the opinions of our readers so long as they meet with our stated guidelines.

That being said, here’s hoping that our tech gurus are able to pinpoint the issue or, if not, here’s hoping nothing like that ever happens again. I feel awful when I discover that one letter somehow didn’t make it to print so, needless to say, last week was something of an emotional roller coaster in the letters department.