Cable Story, Continued

Yesterday I began telling you the old story of the time our cable company saw its West Los Angeles system go down on Super Bowl Sunday, and the Senior Officer Present was me – because everyone senior to me was playing ostrich that day. After getting Trevor and his crew on the way out to deal with the system I cleared out our voicemail, got the incoming phone lines working, and started fielding the constant streams of irate calls that were still coming in at a rate of about 2 a minute. There were a lot of people out there looking at static, and all of them wanted somebody to yell at. At times like this, there’s really no substitute for a live voice on the line telling them that our best people are on their way to fix the system right now, and we will keep you posted…

About an hour later I got a call from Trevor, who had reached the microwave transmitter for our West L.A. system and discovered the source of the problem. As it turned out, someone had cut through the cable linking the transmitter with the Earth Station that collected the signals from the satellites in orbit and converted them back into television with a fire axe. They could tell it was a fire axe because the guy who did it was still wandering around on the roof of the building that housed the transmitter and the Earth Station control room (it was another apartment building, to which we also provided cable service) waving the axe around…

When the police were summoned and had managed to subdue the axe man, they asked him why he had cut the cable. The man replied that he was concerned that the signals from our satellite dishes would attract Flying Saucers, which would then land on top of the building and collapse the roof, killing him. If that sounds insane to you, you should know that the man with the axe didn’t even live in the building; he claimed his ex-girlfriend did, and he was worried about being crushed by UFOs at some future point after they reconciled, but no one was ever able to identify who his girlfriend was supposed to be. The policemen on the scene conceded that he might have been making that part up…

Back at headquarters, my life had dramatically improved on receiving this call. The people calling to demand updates on their cable were generally mollified when I told them that the system would be back up in time for the game, and when I explained about the lunatic with the axe a lot of them actually went from angry to sympathetic. In the cases where anyone was still peeved, I generally told them “Look, we can build you a system that’s proof against weather, equipment failure, sunspots, human error, even power outages – but there’s only so much anyone can do about idiots with axes.” Even our most irate customers generally had to agree that this was the case…

When Monday morning arrived I explained the situation to the management team of the company, and told them what I’d done about it. I couldn’t tell if the senior managers wanted to fire me for promising Trevor the $400 an hour (it wound up being about 2.5 hours total, counting travel time – the broken cable wasn’t that hard to replace), or commend me for not only handling the situation but getting a private contracting firm to show up on a Sunday. In the event, no one said anything to me about the events of the day before; they just told me to go ahead and pay the bill that had arrived for this emergency service, and went off to do whatever it was they did on weekdays…

I know; it’s not a situation that any of you are ever likely to encounter. Except for one key point: when you leave someone in charge of the company (especially when you leave them hanging like that) you are creating a policy maker, whether you want to or not. Unless you want the junior member of your management team to make decisions that could cost you a lot more than you really want to pay, answer your freaking telephone!