Timing is everything

Today's the big day: our corporate president for the television division is in town, a fact which escaped me until an email late yesterday announced a general staff meeting later this afternoon. It was obvious that something was up when we had a crew outside washing the crushed stone around the bushes by my window. And from the sudden flurry of redecoration in the lobby area: nicely framed promotional posters of our network programming, plus two new shelves (not quite level) for our latest awards. Welcome: we love us.

There's a strong parallel between corporate visits and ratings periods: each is preceded by a week or two of frenzied cleanup, we make an all out effort to impress, and afterwords things go pretty much back to normal. I always wonder what it would be like to constantly operate as if we were being observed. I also wonder how much of this our visitors (and viewers) perceive.

Of course, this visit has not gone unnoticed by Mr. Murphy. At about four this morning one of the fiberoptic lines between our Syracuse hub facility and the Binghamton station failed, taking out standard definition programming to our two Binghamton stations and one Rochester station, plus the computer networking to both sites. The high definition feeds are on a different fiber, so we are using those to keep everyone on the air. It took a bit of creative thinking and some minor repatching, but things are fairly stable while Dominion Telecom is looking for the problem. We're betting it's a bad patch in the downtown Binghamton Verizon office.

In the meantime there's plenty of moaning, and a couple of already stressed-out folks look like they expect our guest to stomp into the studio, the reincarnation of Caligula, glaring at us with his fist thrust forward, thumb down. Nos moritabamus te salutatem! Those of us about to die salute you! (Thank you, Mrs. Metosh.)

I have pointed out more than once today that equipment fails all the time, everywhere; what counts is how you respond to it. Everyone's on the air, nobody's losing money. And because Rochester and Binghamton are disconnected from the computer network, that's all the more internet bandwidth for the rest of us!

They didn't take much comfort in that.