Flying Saucers and Basic Cable

I saw a story online yesterday about one of the cable television companies that provides service to New York City losing their feed during the Super Bowl, leaving all of their residents without any way of watching the game. You can read about the details here if you want to, but the story reminded me of one of the more outrageous stories to come out of my time in cable television…

It was Super Bowl Sunday 1993, and I was working for a small private cable company in Los Angeles, California. This entire industry is extinct in the United States, now; unable to compete with broadband and DSS systems, most of the companies that did this have gone under or evolved into something else. But back in the early 1990s there were a number of companies using alternative technologies to compete with the entrenched cable companies, and I worked for one that provided service to several large residential properties using a microwave system. On the morning of the Super Bowl 1993 I had gone to the warehouse store to pick up some munchies for the party later, when my pager went off about fifty times in less than ten minutes. A quick call to our answering service confirmed that our entire West Los Angeles system was down…

Now, you have to remember that I was not the president of the cable company; I wasn’t even one of the senior managers. In fact, whether or not I actually classed as a manager at all depended on whether the people who ran the outfit wanted me to be in charge of something – but that’s a rant for another day. For the purposes of this story, all that matters is that there were four people senior to me in the company, and not one of them was answering their home phone OR responding to their pager (this was before cell phones). Like it or not, I had just inherited the worst technical problem in the history of our company; a situation so bad that it really couldn’t be described without using the word “cluster” somewhere…

I aborted the warehouse run and scrambled for my office, where I discovered that at least 300 of our customers had called demanding to know when their cable would be repaired, at which point our voice mail had overloaded and crashed as well. I was also unable to reach any of the managers senior to me OR any of our in-house repair people, all of whom should have had their pagers on, Sunday or not. With no other choice, I called the contractor we used for heavy construction projects and repairs our in-house people didn’t have time (or the expertise) to do. Fortunately, I had their Chief Engineer’s home number…

Trevor (that was his name) didn’t really want to roll out from Diamond Bar to West L.A. on Super Bowl Sunday, and grumbled that he was going to bill us double time and a half ($100 an hour instead of the usual $40 – remember, this was 16 years ago) for the call. I reminded him that all of the people who outranked me were incommunicado, and asked if he knew what that made me. “No; what does that make you?” he replied.

“Senior Officer Present,” I told him. “The only people who can countermand this order are refusing to obey their own regulations, and have stated in writing that under these conditions I am in charge of the cable company. And I don’t care WHAT you bill us for as long as the West L.A. system is up before game time! Any questions?”

You could hear Trevor grinning. “No sir,” he replied. “We’ll get right out there, and I’ll call you when we’re onsite. All four of us, that is.”

That meant it would be $400 an hour instead of the usual $40 – and there was nothing my superiors could do about it. They could fire me (and might) but they’d lose any legal efforts to avoid paying him (that whole “customary practice” thing). I really liked working with Trevor and his boys. And what they found when they got on site convinced me that I’d made the right call…

But that’s going to have to wait for tomorrow’s post…