One of these two things are true:

- The control room really is a nightly exercise in crisis management but I never realized it until I started putting it into words by blogging.

- The control room has only been a nightly exercise in crisis management since we began doing debate coverage.

I suppose there may be a third combination but it's late and I'm too tired to come up with what that may be. 

Tonight's issue ... AC360 was originally supposed to be on the air from the end of the Democratic debate at 9:32p until 11:00p.  Then we got word they were extending the debate  (Great call in my opinion. It was really interesting to see Hillary and Barack go one-on-one.)  so we'd get it at 9:40p.  Then 9:50p.  We finally took over at 9:52p.  But even though we had lost twenty minutes of air time, we still had the same number of really smart, really interesting guests and how do you just randomly pick one or more of them to cancel at the last minute?  We didn't cancel anyone but it was a mad scramble to figure out how to make it all work timewise. 

The good news tonight was that with Anderson back in New York we had no trouble with the prompter!

To answer someone's question from one of the blogs ... yes, on nights like tonight there is some yelling in the control room.  But no one takes it personally and we also still made time for a few laughs. 

See you tomorrow.