We try to not point fingers here at Designated Writers, so we will try to be as discreet as possible.

You may have thought that DW went away for awhile because we were taking a hard-line stance on the whole virus thing and decided to start socially distancing ourselves from our keyboard. (Hey, you can’t too careful.) But that’s not it.

There have been some adjustments to make. Like many of you, we did have toilet paper escapades a few weeks ago that seem so trivial now and so non-trivial back then.

If you are wondering what happened to Designated Writers, here’s the deal. Without naming names, one of us blew it up. Wasn’t trying to, but one evening when he was scribing to daylight, he got out a little too far over his technology skis and that was all she wrote. That was a tough call to make to the other Designated Writer, but it wasn’t exactly along the lines of wrecking Dad’s new car.

Rather not say who, but if you are looking for a clue, his name rhymes with “Freddy Fallen.” Since there are no technology gurus on the DW staff, we did the only thing we know how to do in this type of situation — sit around and hope it would fix itself.

After about a week or two (or three), we finally got around to calling R&D (Research and Development), which is actually headquartered in another state. We would have made the trip sooner, but that state’s governor, obviously not a DW devotee, wouldn’t let us in.

R&D had a backlog of jobs to attend to, so we had to wait our turn. And wait. And wait some more.

Well, one thing led to another (isn’t it supposed to?) and, after some technological wizardly that we have no chance of explaining, R&D earned their keep. In the words of George Costanza, “We’re back, baby!”

Hope you got a chance to read that Hank Aaron column; it was only up there for two months. Even The Hammer got tired of reading it.

It is our intent to pick up where we left off and this time, try not to blow up the website. There is a DW website re-design in the offing but we will get to that when R&D is damn well ready.

In the meantime, we’ve got lots of stuff to tell you about. Most will be written and some will be in audio or video form. We hope you will continue to support us and want nothing more than to hear your opinion on what you like and what you don’t like. Feel free to drop us an email at designatedwriters@yahoo.com.