…“Gang aft a-gley,” according to a poem by Robert Burns. That last line means “often go awry.”

Having plans go awry goes for newspaper women as well as newspaper men, as this past week dramatically showed.

Here is what happened.

Register publisher/general manager Lori Nauman and circulation manager Wendy Cole were making plans for delivering the Register the week of Christmas.

On a normal week, the Register is all put together on Thursday, sent to the printers in Madelia on Friday morning and printed, inserted, addressed and bagged into mailbags during the day on Friday.

Our delivery person, an independent contractor who lives near Mankato, picks up the finished Registers in Madelia at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, and proceeds to drive them all around the area to post offices and businesses which sell the Register.

His route takes him to Fairmont, Granada, Blue Earth, Swea City (Iowa), Lakota (Iowa), Buffalo Center (Iowa), Kiester, Bricelyn, Frost, Wells, Easton, Delavan, Winnebago, Amboy and then back home again.

But the week of Christmas, different plans were made. The plan was to bump everything up a day.

So, we would put the Register together on Wednesday, send it to the printer in Madelia on Thursday, and the delivery driver would pick them all up on Friday morning at 4:30 a.m.

There were three major reasons for doing this.

No. 1 is that would be a way to get the Register into our subscribers’ hands early. Many people would be able to have it in their mail on Friday or Saturday, or be able to buy it in a news stand on Friday or Saturday.

Otherwise, many folks would not get it until Tuesday, because Monday was a federal holiday and no mail delivery.

No. 2 reason was to have the delivery person enjoy a full Christmas Eve and Christmas Day weekend off.

No. 3 was that the Register staff had elected to take Friday as their vacation day, not Monday, as it fit better into everyone’s Christmas travel plans.

Then, of course, as everyone knows, there was bad weather on Thursday and worse weather on Friday, when there was a full blown blizzard and roads were closed until Saturday morning.

The delivery driver waited until daybreak (instead of 4:30 a.m.) on Friday to go get the newspapers, even though he was given the option of waiting until the roads were good – even if that would have to be Tuesday morning.

He chose to give it a try Friday morning and he made it for quite a bit of his route, but the weather kept getting worse and worse. He made it to Fairmont, Granada, Blue Earth, Winnebago and into Iowa, then Kiester and Bricelyn.

But then, at Frost, it was hard to see the road, and the roads were snow covered. Yes, he hit a drift and came to a stand still.

Dennis and Sandy Oswald of Frost came to his rescue, and got him off the road.

He ended up staying at the home of Jordan Haaland and family of Frost. They had come to his rescue, too. They fed him, visited with him, let him sleep on their couch. And in the morning they got a tractor and moved snow so he could get his vehicle back on the road.

The driver has a lot of gratitude for the people from Frost who came to his aid. He says they were so nice and expected nothing in return. They are just really awesome people he added.

About 11 a.m. on Saturday he was able to take off again. But, by the time he got to some of the remaining post offices north of Frost, they were understandably closed. So, he went back and delivered the papers to those locations on Monday.

Several parts of this story need additional acknowledgement.

For instance, Lori Nauman’s and Wendy Cole’s planning to get the Christmas newspaper out early started back in November. Who knew those plans would be sabotaged by a blizzard.

The driver who was dedicated to his job and tried his darndest to get the Register to post offices and businesses on schedule.

All you wonderful Register readers, none of whom called and complained about not getting their newspaper on time. I think you all had a pretty good idea of why it might be late.

(That was not true for one of our neighboring publications. One of their subscribers severely chastised them on Social Media for not getting the Friday and Saturday papers to his home on time and actually wanted a refund for late delivery.)

And lastly, but not least, a great big thank you to the fine folks of Frost, particularly the Oswalds and the Haaland family for taking care of the Register driver.

I can’t really say that I am shocked, because there are a whole lot of wonderful folks who live in southern Minnesota.

It is a big reason why we all choose to live here. It certainly is not because of weather like last week.