Island JuJu, Friday 13th, and Power Outages


There is something about this island… one of my friends believes that Roatan has some other-worldly juju … a kind of weird electricity… that causes some people to go ga-ga goo-goo… or open a coffee shop… or start selling real estate.

Or open a radio station. Really it should be pretty simple right?

But it seems that anything that has to do with electricity here on Roatan- toasters, tvs, light bulbs, relationships, small battery powered devices (yes ladies, I’m deliberately avoiding the cheap shot… which of course is a waste of a good cheap shot…) and radio stations are really hard to keep in the “on and up-right” position.

frankensteinRadio is a simple thing…
1) Take Music
2) Break It into Electrons
3) Send the Electrons up a wire to an ANTENNA
4) Have a monkey lala
5) Blast those little particles into the wind
6) Hope someone hears them
7) Have another monkey lala
8) Hope an advertiser is wise enough to let you help them spread the word about their business.
9) Monkey lalas for everyone…

It’s really difficult here…

First Roatan is a beautiful place thanks to the water around it… (SALT WATER… Ever see what salt does to snails… It does the same thing to electronics.)

Second Roatan is a beautiful place thanks to the jungle (lush canopy plus radio waves is like sticking your head in a giant box packed with absorbent cotton towels…) The radio waves get eaten up a lot by the dense jungle.

Third Roatan is beautiful because of these small rocky mountains (the same deep ravines that make it so cool to fly over zip lines don’t always let radio waves through. Radio waves follow the same path as those ziplines … and they don’t like ravines.)

This also makes it difficult for the internet companies and of course RECO… You put up a wire in one place and the wind blows, rain flows, and tree falls on your wire some other place… and while some of you in relationships hope that if falls on your spouse, we all hope it doesn’t fall on your house…

I know the guys and gals who work at these companies… not just the managers but line level people who get out in the field and solve problems and they take a lot of pride in what they do.

And this isn’t throw a switch kind of stuff. It’s math and electronics and I can tell you after mounting my antenna on a tower… sometimes very dangerous work.

So it’s really easy to complain about what doesn’t work when it’s not working. But I was complaining about ATT and Cox Cable and SDGE in the United States… And they aren’t dealing with “island ju-ju”…

They are easy targets because we become so dependent on them we never notice any problems, even though everyday there are problems that are being solved and resolved and we don’t know about those things because we aren’t affected.

And when we do have a problem… When systems fail and they break down, thanks to island juju or “Ju-Ju the Cabbie from Hell” who runs off the road and into a transformer pole while talking to his girlfriend on one phone and texting tonight’s date on his other phone, we whine like spoiled little bratty children… because we are so accustomed to everything being perfect and we never want to admit that things don’t work like that…

This being said it’s getting better…

Thanks to the men and women of Cable Color and RECO, 101.1fm has been able to solve a lot of little problems and knock on wood, the only time 101.1 will be off the air, is when there is a power outage that affects the transmitter area. And if I could get the Reytel guys to loan me some juice from their gigantic battery back-up on my hill, we’d never go off the air at all…

Unless I accidentally spilled a monkey lala on the transmitter…

Which reminds me.. There is a planned outage and WE WILL BE OFF THE AIR 7a until 12NOON FRIDAY March 13th… (all of West Bay) … West End will be off 1pm until 5pm…

FRIDAY THE 13th… See … there is that ju-ju…Keith Miller Profile Pic