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2004-03-11 - 10:47 p.m.
Cranky Woman is BACK!!

Didja miss me?

Thing one: I hear through the grapvine that when Captain Freezy went to report the MIA program, the FIRST thing he said was "I didn't delete it, BUT....." Oh for fuck's sake. If you DIDN'T then who the fuck DID? I later told my boss that yes, I made everything OK before I went home last night, and, by the way, I am REALLY sick of people around the office never being willing to take responsibility for anything.

Except Drama Queen and me. We have such overdeveloped senses of responsibility and guilt that we're both SURE that whole nasty Iraq thing could have been avoided if we'd only done SOMETHING better or differently.....

I'm surprised everyone else doesn't walk around with sprained fingers from all the pointing....

So, the crisis dujour at the station today involved power. Again. Somehow, we tripped a couple of breakers. I think WE, per se, didn't, but two internet/paging company/whoever the fuck they were guys did.

There I am...it's late afternoon, it's already been a hell day, I'm already behind, I have an appointment at 3, which is the WORST time in the world for me to have an appointment, because my "air shift" starts at 4, and I need to have that last hour to get all the duckies in a row. I'm running around, trying to get shit done, and I notice that we've got a beeping UPS in the satellite room. Oh well, it will just have to beep, because I have other shit to do. Then a sales guy comes down and tells me the server has shut down, and sent a power failure notice. "should I call the engineer". "Yeah, that's a good idea". I made sure the broadcast stuff was ok, and went back to fighting my own fires.

First reports from engineers lead us to believe nothing bad will happen.

They were wrong. The fricking UPS failed, killing all the equipment in the rack. ALL the equipment. Like, all the demods (think of them as satellite tuners). So we went off the air. Mind you, we don't know that we've tripped the breakers, we just know that there's some kind of weird problem. And we've had those damn UPS units fail before. Job one right now is figuring out how to get SOME kind of power restored. The GM and I are crawling around, doing our Keystone Engineer routines ("what's THIS button do?"), when I finally determined the UPS had died, and maybe plugging into a wall would work. It did. yay. radio is back.

Finally got my poop in a group. GM discovered tripped breakers and reset them. UPS units begin to look happy again. Engineer comes in. I explain what happened, and what my remedy was. He stomps his little engineer foot and says "Don't DO that. We don't want that stuff plugged into the wall. We have NO protection. The littlest blip will knock us off. Why would you do that?"

And bless my little heart, I looked back at him, raised my voice right back and said "I KNOW why we have the UPS units, and I KNOW it isn't wise to have all that equipment plugged directly into a wall socket. HOWEVER. We were OFF THE AIR TOTALLY, and my first concern is getting THAT taken care of, by whatever means."

Fucker. I swear. If I'm going to have to do engineer shit (and BELIEVE you me, I do...there's a bunch of tech stuff I handle as a routine part of my job that is the sole purview of engineers at Husband's stations.....

where was I? Oh yeah, if I am going to have to do engineer shit, they had better not be fussing at me for the solutions I come up with to get things back on the air. So I use peppermint chewing gum and bailing wire instead of cinnamon gum and duct tape. If you want it done your way, then your ass needs to be on site when the shit's going down. I'm a fricking history and sociology major. I don't know ohms and watts and electrons.

I'll say this for us liberal arts majors...we may not do things the Engineer Way, but we can usually figure out a creative means to get something to work.

Grrr.

My back is killing me. It was the hardest part of spin class tonight...my aching shoulders and back. Gotta get project boobies back on the front burner.

But...until then, Husband has promised a rub. With oil.

1 comments so far
Pandionna - 2004-03-12 12:16:39
Good grief! My head hurts just reading about it. How frazzling!
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