I’ve had one of those weeks were few things go right. Sometimes you can look back on a situation and think, that could have been handled better. Other times there is nothing that could have been done to prevent a problem or problems.
This week started with a continuing T-1 outage to our transmitter site. This site is serviced by two T-1 circuits, a main and a backup. Unfortunately, there was a major cable cut that took out both circuits, and the dial up phone line and every other TELCO circuit in the building. In this case, backups didn’t matter.
I got around the issue by bringing the AudioVault server to the transmitter site. The program director then drove updates to the transmitter site and loaded them in manually. Operating from the transmitter site was out of the question for numerous reasons.
This particular radio station is the General Manager’s favorite, thus he called often for updates, which can be annoying. Nothing worse than trying to fix a problem when you are being continuously interrupted by phone calls. I tried to explain to him that it didn’t matter how good the format was, whenever a station is off the air it takes priority over everything else. In this case, however, there was not a lot we could do other than wait for the phone company to fix the problem.
On top of that, another station’s STL transmitter decided to stop working in the middle of the night, which prompted a 1am drive in to the studio. Add to that the missed appointment by the utility company that left me sitting at a third transmitter site wasting time for an hour, the dead battery in the engineering truck, and the constant nit picking by the corporate office over the expenditure of every nickle and sometimes I have to ask myself; is this worth it?
Explaining to the accountants why we need to replace a 24 year old transmitter at a mountain top transmitter site before the snow flies, for the fifth time, is a little wearing. Explaining to them why we should lease a new studio building were we don’t need T-1 circuits for STLs (there are plenty of good places out there), especially in light of the 10 day outage we just experienced, is like trying to explain to somebody why it is a bad idea to set yourself on fire. BECAUSE YOU’LL DIE!
Of course, this is the same company that allowed one of their studios to deteriorate so badly that the production person fell through the floor. No kidding, it was a single wide moble home, she fell through the floor onto the ground below. I often wonder how we didn’t get sued or fined.
It may be time.
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