I used to dread answering the newsroom phones at Keloland during serious storms because 90 percent of the time those calling were upset about our weather guys cutting into their favorite programs to bring weather alerts. There would be nothing I could say that would calm them down, especially if they were not in the direct path of the storm. They couldn\u2019t care less if the folks up in Roberts County needed to take shelter, \u201cGet The Amazing Race back on the air, dammit.\u201d I would usually listen to them moan and groan; then try to explain our weather department\u2019s reasoning for the program interrupts. \u201cYou don\u2019t want viewers to be uninformed about potentially deadly weather do you?\u201d More often than not, though, that didn\u2019t help and the callers would likely resort to colorful expletives to express their displeasure. My rule was if I heard any of the George Carlin words you can\u2019t say on TV, I\u2019d tell the caller I don\u2019t have to listen to that and hang up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I mention all this because, during Sunday evening\u2019s severe thunderstorms in Southeastern Keloland, it was ME who was looking to pick-up a phone and scream at somebody. Not the meteorologists at Keloland or any of the other local stations but at Midco cable TV and that *%$#@ computer voice that overrides every channel on my cable system to bring me an Emergency Alert. Okay, I get it, but there are several problems\u2026one of them potentially dangerous. First, during severe storms, time is \u201ccritical\u201d and it takes forever for the automated EAS information to come on the air and then go through the warning areas. It\u2019s audio only so there\u2019s no radar screen to see the area mentioned and severity of the storm. If I try to switch to a local station for breaking weather information gathered by their experienced meteorologists using the latest state of the art Doppler\u2019s, Vipers and computer models , the cable\u2019s EAS won\u2019t let me change the station keeping its customers locked-on to that channel until the primitively acquired already dated information runs its exasperatingly slow\u00a0course..then, after a\u00a0 few computer beeps and buzzes, finally sets us free.<\/p>\n
To make matters even worse was that during the height of the storm Sunday night, the EAS signal would break into programming but it was all garble..a pixilated mess where you not only couldn\u2019t hear that horrid computer voice, you couldn\u2019t see the warning information slowly crawling across the screen. So during that 3 or 4 minutes, we had no idea where the storm was or it\u2019s intensity and, of course, I couldn\u2019t change the cable channel over to Brian Karstens and that new guy to find out what was really going on. I wonder if stormy weather was to blame for the garbled EAS signal. That would be a dangerous irony.<\/p>\n
Okay, normally, I don\u2019t get too worked up about thunderstorms and haven\u2019t sought shelter in our basement in years but my dear Linda who had traveled with her sisters to Omaha for a graduation party, was driving home from Sioux Center, Iowa during the thick of it. She needed to concentrate on the road, so I didn\u2019t want to keep calling her cell. The only way I was able to keep her up to\u00a0speed on the storm’s latest trajectory was with my computer set to Keloland.com. I had a drink ready for\u00a0her when she finally rolled safely into our driveway..shaken but not stirred.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I tried to call the guy in charge at Midco to express my displeasure and public safety concerns with EAS cutaways that kill all other channel options and, in this case, offered only garbled unintelligible warning information\u2026but, you know, it was a holiday weekend. Probably at the lake.<\/p>\n
If memory serves, the month of June is notorious for tornados in this part of the world and I don\u2019t want to be watching Trobec showing me exactly where the twister is only to have him cut-off and locked out by EAS. Houses could blow away with people still inside by the time that robot voice comes on with its slow antiquated pap. If, weather permitting, it comes on at all.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m keeping the Direct TV and Dish phone numbers handy just in case, oh wait..aren\u2019t they both prone to malfunctioning during bad weather too?<\/p>\n
How about rabbit ears? \u00a0I wonder if I can still buy rabbit ears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I used to dread answering the newsroom phones at Keloland during serious storms because 90 percent of the time those calling were upset about our weather guys cutting into their favorite programs to bring weather alerts. There would be nothing I could say that would calm them down, especially if they were not in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lund-at-large","category-60","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11718,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2046\/revisions\/11718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jodystaples.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}