Now hear this... or not

I get an awful lot of email at work. Real email, not offers for various forms of personal enhancement. Even in-house spam ("I'm raising money for the Central New York Vegan Society during their Weinerfest this weekend, and I need sponsors! Just a dollar for every hot dog I can eat will make an enormous difference!! Forward this to everyone you know!!!") gets a rapid and firm squelching from our IT department. My daughter says "commas are our friends," but in-house spammers love exclamation points.

Most of the messages come from two in-house mailing lists: one for television engineers, the other for radio engineers. Since we have several dozen TV stations and over 1,300 radio stations, it's unusual for five minutes to pass without hearing the Outlook chime. Usually it's someone looking for an obsolete part or asking an edgy question ("Are other stations having trouble with the Rush contact closures today? I've missed all my local breaks again"), which elicits half a dozen replies of varying usefulness within the next two minutes.

This morning's mailbag included a query from a radio engineer whose station does a weekly show from an oceanside restaurant's pier: how can I get rid of background noise and interference from the audience? Suggestions poured forth about equalizers, audio processors, different microphones, automatic mixers.

I thought, if you don't want to hear what's going on around you, why not just do the show in the studio?

It just doesn't pay to ask questions like that. Usually the answer involves consultants or salesmen and includes a statement like "we've got to maximize our leadership paradigm."

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Yesterday turned out pretty much as expected. The fiber problem was found: a bad splice just down the street from the Binghamton Verizon office, and everything's back up and running. And we survived The Visit with no loss of life.

Washing down all those stones probably made the difference.