Free at last, free at last...

Four o-clock, and I'm just now sitting down to lunch. The folks verifying our microwave equipment inventory have finished up and left, so this is something of a celebration... or it will be, as soon as I deal with the fly that keeps racing through my office.

* * *

Back again. The fly is gone, dispatched by a can of freeze spray I keep in my cupboard. It was either that or the blaze orange spray paint I use to mark where to bury electrical conduit.

* * *

Hooray for the end of the inventory verification! Several weeks ago we tallied up every piece of equipment we use for news microwave pickups and entered it into Sprint / Nextel's web site; Tuesday they sent a two-man team from an independent company in New Jersey to verify our counts. Nice folks — a quiet, studious youngster learning the ropes and an older fellow with network experience and a bottomless supply of stories to match. The inventory could probably have been finished by the close of business yesterday, except that seemingly everything we ran across reminded the team leader, whom I shall call Inspector #1, of a story. And since he's a conoisseur of RCA broadcast equipment, our still-functional 1962 vintage TT-11 transmitter proved to be an irresistable diversion. Our poor transmitter supervisor was sorely tried yesterday as the inventory dragged into the evening hours, especially as thunderstorms rolled in and the stories rolled on.

I had the duty today, going through everything at the studio and explaining how it fits together into our different systems. And listening to more stories. Turns out Inspector #1 has worked with some of the same folks at ABC I've done satellite uplinks for, including a Good Morning America producer who was annoyed with our phones because, as she put it, "Dial tone hurts my fingers. I need a touch tone phone, not a dial tone phone." You just can't make these things up.

Finally everything's been tagged, logged, and photographed from every direction. We all agree on the final count, a remarkable feat considering that this is hundreds of items spread over three sites and two towers. It also represents a successful effort on our part to get ahead of the curve: we are now roughly a month ahead of the Sprint / Nextel timeline. If we can keep this up, we should be able to get our tower work done this autumn, rather than in December or January as they forecast. Obviously the folks drawing up the timeline have never tried to hoist a large antenna 880 feet up a tower during a snowstorm.

So now Inspector #1 and Inspector #2 are on their way back to New Jersey. I imagine that for Inspector #2, it's going to be a long ride.