Title: Former Telecommunications Manager
Employer: Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Nickname/Alias: "Radio unit 545," going back to the days when I was on a volunteer rescue squad in North Carolina. (They made me a member mostly so they could put a two-way radio in my car to let me know when they were working an interesting call. My real job, if I was first on the scene, was to radio in a condition report and then offer aid to the victims by shouting, "I hear 'em coming, I hear 'em coming." Friends do not call me Kenny if they want to stay my friends. What I'm Best Known For (in the Telecom World): Wise-ass, usually irrelevant and, almost always, irreverent, comments. Other Primary Areas of Expertise: Once I passed the age where I could no longer be the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize, I focused on bean counting. Then I discovered that they didn't award a Pulitzer for the Most Attractive Spreadsheet Produced Under Deadline and switched my attention to telecommunications. Summary of Professional Background: Except for one summer working as a laborer for my Dad's road construction company when I was 16 (he wanted to give me a practical reason for going to college), I've worked for newspapers since I was 12 years old. At some point or another, I've done just about every job there is to do in the newsroom, but most of my career was spent as a photographer or director of photography. I had one year as editorial operations manager, responsible for budgeting, construction projects, computer-assisted reporting and doing all the scut work the managing editor didn't want to do. My photos illustrated a book, "New Burlington, Death of a Small Town," about a town in southern Ohio that was destroyed by the Corp of Engineers as part of a flood control project. I've covered race riots in Illinois, anti-war protests in Ohio and Washington, D.C., a truckers' strike in Alabama, the gas shortage in Detroit, a blizzard in Indiana, Ku Klux Klan rallies in three states and the Cuban Boatlift. I've attempted to cover, with little success, the landfall of at least 13 hurricanes. (Unfortunately, four of them have found my house in the last few years.) On the other hand, I've also been to a thousand Kiwanis club plaque presentations, 40-million fender-benders and several hundred bridal showers. I still get nostalgic for the smell of teargas in the springtime. Prediction on the Future of Telecom & Telecom Managers: Please, please, please have a future that lasts until at least 2012 or the first Saturday when I can guess more than three lousy numbers right on the Florida Lottery. Weirdest Thing People Usually Don't Know about Me: I appeared in the opening credits of the movie Scarface. (Look for the photographer in the yellow Cat hat framed between waving Cuban refugees. When I'm not talking or doing something in relation to telecom, I'm usually... Napping. Or riding 30-100 miles on my bicycle. I ain't fast, but I get there. Book and author I'm currently reading: I usually have several going at the same time. Just finished Hemingway's "Hurricane" (The Great Florida Keys Storm of 1935); one-third into Rick Bragg's biography of growing up poor in the south, "All Over but the Shoutin' "; bogged down in "Inside Toyland, Working, Shopping and Social Inequality" (written by a tenured sociology prof and shows it). In the Steinhoff One-Stall Reading Library is a copy of "The Idler Book of Crap Jobs," a compilation of the "worst, mind-numbing, humiliating, horrendous, horrific jobs you can think of." Interestingly enough, telemarketer and IT manager make the list, but telecom manager doesn't. CD currently or most recently in my car stereo: I generally have audio books in my car stereo. I just finished "Columbus' Last Voyage" and am now listening to "Consider the Lobster." The stupidest thing I've ever seen anyone do or say in relation to a phone: A co-worker transferred a call to me, warning me that the woman was a whacko. A woman speaking in what I suspect she thought was a hoity-toity British accent said that she was talking with "a journalist" when her phone became "disengaged." She was convinced that "there was something fundamental to our apparatus" that was keeping her line engaged and preventing her from making or receiving telephone calls. I asked for more details: her number, did she call us or did we call her, what number did she dial, who was she talking with, etc. etc. She kept throwing around more and more jargon, trying to convince me that "our apparatus" was attacking her. I tried to explain to her that it was unlikely that we would be able to capture her line if she called us, but that I would check. She wanted to be "absolutely positive" that we weren't mucking with her phone. I said, "Mam, I can't be positively, absolutely sure that green frogs won't fly out of the sky, but I can be reasonably sure that we are not your problem." "Green frogs? I don't understand what green frogs have to do with it," she said. "I'm trying to say that I can't be absolutely positive about ANYTHING. NO absolute statement is worth anything, including this one. I will, however, assure you that I will personally and individually check each and every line we have to insure that we are not keeping your phone engaged." I hung up and dialed her number, where I got a phone company intercept saying that the call couldn't be completed. About 30 minutes later, the woman called back. Short-circuiting her rant about our "fundamental apparatus," I said, "Yes, I remember speaking with you about your phone, XXX-XXX-XXXX. I called that number and got a telephone company recording saying that it was out of order. I suggest that you call your local phone company and report it." "Are you sure that it's not your fundamental.........?" "No, mam, I would suspect that it has something to do with the hurricane that has covered the State of Florida. "What would that have to do with it?" "I don't want to get too technical, but, if you pick up your phone and you don't hear anything, then it means that your phone is our of order. In the old days, you had a pair of copper wires that ran from your house to the phone company. Now, the phone company uses stuff that requires power in the middle. When the power goes out, your phone doesn't work." AND HERE IT IS. THE BEST LINE I'VE HEARD IN 40-PLUS YEARS IN THE INK-SLINGING BUSINESS: "Sniff. I have a royal princess title and I am not accustomed to hear a worker give me detailed information." | 
