Upon returning home from a weekend excursion, my wife noticed that a low power FM radio station I am under contract to maintain was off the air! Consequently, I immediately went to work.
After calling the station headquarters to confirm there was no problem with the satellite downlink, I headed to the transmitter site. Even before entering the transmitter building, the problem was loud and clear – the emergency power backup generator at the cell phone tower across the street was running. There was no electricity at the top of the hill where several transmitting facilities were located.
I learned later from a listener there had been a thunderstorm the night before and the station had been off the air all day. I found that a bit incredulous. Had the diesel generator been running for hours without the cell phone company being aware of it? Were the operators of the equipment in the other transmitter shacks unaware their stuff had been silent all day? And why didn’t this listener make a phone call to find out why his favorite radio station was down for so long?
I am concluding that way too many people are not proactive. They sit and watch the world go by as though everything is a matter of fate. Perhaps if more people would get off their duff and exercise some influence, our world would be an improved place.
2 comments:
I almost never make a call in those situations because I assume-
1) they have some technology that auto alerts them to serious problems
2) others already have made the call & the last thing they need is a zillion people bugging them when they are already very likely working their tails off to fix the problem
I see both sides of the issue. Automatic monitors and notification systems are fantastic, but it is simply not feasible to incorporate those kinds of systems across the board. In situations where automatic monitoring is not an option, we often rely on end users to let us know when something is down. It's stressful having 500 people call in at once, but by the same token, if nobody calls the system or feature might stay down for hours or days before we are even aware of it.
As an end user, if it's something I absolutely need ASAP I will call in right away. If, on the other hand, it is recreational or low priority for me, I tend to take a "wait and see" approach--for largely the same reasons Deb posted. I would put an FM radio station in this category--unless, of course, I had a business that relied on this station for running my advertisements.
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