10 FEB 03: IS SOMETHING WRONG HERE?
I am thankful to blog tonight, after my phone line was down all day. I've yet to hear exactly what went wrong - but my TV station's new Doppler radar IS only a few blocks away. Hmmmm....
I called the phone company at the office, to report my loss of service. But when I dialed 611, a very short tone was followed by nothing but silence. If you're listening for my complaint, please be polite enough to let me know.
I wound up posting the loss of service at BellSouth's web site. The phone company e-mailed me back, revealing service was out in an entire area. Apparently everybody else in my neighborhood has cell phones, because no one called the TV station to complain about it.
What disturbed me about the reply message was that BellSouth promised to have the outage fixed by "Thursday at 8:00 p.m." A FOUR-DAY phone outage, in the heart of a mid-sized city?! Did they hire all their repair workers from Puerto Rico or something?
(At least the problem was fixed in ONE day, not four. It pays to live in the Historic District - with a growing number of law offices in it.)
Our TV station began a week-long blood drive today - and I was so provoked, that I raced to the Red Cross to give blood after producing the 5:00 p.m. news. I was even more provoked by The Boss allowing me to give blood without clocking out.
Bad sign #1 about the blood drive: I walked into the donation room, and was greeted by a big guy in a white jacket saying in an amazingly dropout-sounding voice: "I'm new here, so I'm learning everything...."
Bad sign #2 about the blood drive: I stepped out for a moment to use the restroom before beginning the donation process - and found a sign reminding me to flush the toilet after I was through.
To be fair: everything went smoothly with my blood donation. Well, so far it has. At least the Red Cross hasn't sent out an ambulance, just in case....
My TV station set up the week-long blood drive because of serious problems with the Georgia blood supply in recent weeks. Dozens of donations had to be quarantined and possibly discarded, because some kind of white substance became mixed with the blood. If this was orange juice, I might dismiss it as added calcium.
The mysterious substance was analyzed last week - but for some strange reason, the Red Cross has yet to reveal what that white substance was. It's only a matter of time before Jesse Jackson gets suspicious about this....
(At least this provides a refreshing change of pace for my TV newsroom. Usually when we talk about "white stuff," we mean snow.)