[Speed Gibson,
Thursday December 7, 2006 at 12:18am]
Safety Nazis get Cable
11:18 PM I'm liveblogging a cable outage, only I'm not really going to blame Comcast. It's our friends the Safety Nazis who somehow have made it a requirement to wire the Emergency Broadcast System to take over all channels from time to time to broadcast weather bulletins, Amber alerts, and tests.
Today you may have heard the sirens being tested as usual at 1 pm on the first Wednesday of this month. Apparently they also do a test on cable as well. But like the M-5 unit, the override will not disengage.
I tried calling the 800 number and after a couple of "please waits" got a message that they're just too swamped with calls to even think about handling mine. Click.
Yes, it's Comcast's system, but I think the Safety Nazis deserve all the blame here. I was recording Top Chef when this struck, meaning I probably lost the end of the episode. This show is repeated several times, so it's no big deal.
11:34 PM The outage is over, about 30 minutes total. I see it wiped out the recording of White House Christmas with Dr. Phil's wife that my wife had set to record. She'll have to wait until Friday night's encore. I lost the last 6 minutes of Top Chef, so I'll be up to 1 AM for the replay.
I sent Comcast an email, asking how I can contact the Safety Nazis directly to complain. We'll see what happens.
Today you may have heard the sirens being tested as usual at 1 pm on the first Wednesday of this month. Apparently they also do a test on cable as well. But like the M-5 unit, the override will not disengage.
I tried calling the 800 number and after a couple of "please waits" got a message that they're just too swamped with calls to even think about handling mine. Click.
Yes, it's Comcast's system, but I think the Safety Nazis deserve all the blame here. I was recording Top Chef when this struck, meaning I probably lost the end of the episode. This show is repeated several times, so it's no big deal.
11:34 PM The outage is over, about 30 minutes total. I see it wiped out the recording of White House Christmas with Dr. Phil's wife that my wife had set to record. She'll have to wait until Friday night's encore. I lost the last 6 minutes of Top Chef, so I'll be up to 1 AM for the replay.
I sent Comcast an email, asking how I can contact the Safety Nazis directly to complain. We'll see what happens.