Autumn Belfontaine was in the middle of putting together the morning news program when her phone chimed incoming text. She was fully expecting it to be one of her news team, or perhaps someone in one or another department that wanted to submit news.
Instead it was her old friend Dan from her student radio days. Are you where you can talk?
I’m getting ready to go on the air in fifteen minutes. If it’s something you can tell me quick, OK. Otherwise, it may be best to wait until I have some time, and I contact you.
OK. Just wondering if you had any ideas about how to deal with intermittent power. We’re having random rolling blackouts around here, and with all the trouble we’re having getting fuel for our backup generator, we’re having to go off the air if they last too long.
Honestly, I’m not that strong on the engineering side of stuff. However, I’ve got a fairly good rapport with the people in Engineering, so I’m sure I could pick some brains around here.
Thanks. I’ll let you go now. Looks like I’m going to have some more work to do out at the transmitter.
Bye.
As Autumn put her phone back away, she considered the news. She’d heard about places having trouble maintaining electrical generation and distribution, but most of them were in countries where technology had been thin on the ground from the beginning, or in extremely backwoods parts of the US, like some parts of Alaska or remote valleys up in the Rockies or odd places in the Mojave. But while people from the big cities might think of rural Minnesota as the middle of nowhere, it was not exactly the sort of place where civilization was stretched thin.