MONDAY, JUNE 28, 2010
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B3 Loudoun radio fans dash to test their skills by Phillip Lucas JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON
Playing a grown-up, less fun version of hide-and-seek
I refuse to be ground down. I am hard. I am harder than a diamond sword sunk in a corundum anvil. I am harder than a month-old fruit cake. I am harder than Einstein’s Gmail password. Yea, though I walk through
T
the valley of the shadow of the corporate voice mail jungle, I fear nothing. Of course, even getting to the
corporate voice mail jungle has been an ordeal. It used to be there were these books full of telephone numbers, listed alphabetically by person or business. “You can find that on the Web
now,” My Lovely Wife said, after she’d thrown all our phone books out. Except you can’t find that on
the Web, not always, not easily. A lot of companies delight in hiding their phone numbers. Go to their Web page and you see lots of words and colors and maybe a handsome photograph of a single tree standing in a vast green field, an image that is supposed to say what, exactly? Probity? Compassion? Commitment to the environment? We bought some nice stock photography? But where’s the freaking phone number? Is it under that little tab that
says “Contact”? No, when I click there I get a blank form to send an e-mail. Not the actual e-mail address, mind you, just a blank form and a dropdown menu that invites me to characterize my message in some fashion: billing, product information, troubleshooting, suicide prevention . . . As if I need to bend my needs and desires to their preconceived pigeonholes. Eventually I find a phone number, and the real fun begins. If I know my party’s extension, the recorded greeting informs me, I may dial it at any time. Of course, if I knew my party’s extension I wouldn’t be calling this main number, this secret main number, a number that I have obtained at high cost indeed, requiring, as it did, night vision goggles and illicit payoffs and the assistance of a double-agent named Carlos who may be taking his last breath, shot in the gut by the shadowy operatives of The Corporation for divulging such sensitive information.
If I want billing, I may press 1. If I want product information, I may press 2. If I want troubleshooting, I
hey try to grind me down, those unwashed offspring of unmarried parents, but
may press 3. If I want suicide prevention, I
may press 4. Imay press 5 to dial my party by last name.
And here I pause. Do I know
my party’s last name? Didn’t I once, long ago, speak to a Mr. Jones there? Or was it Johnson? Or maybe he spelled it Jonson? I feel my neck starting to
sweat as I tentatively tap in J . . . O ... N ...
And then I am cut off. There
is no Mr. Jon — . There never was. What a fool I’ve been! I can’t just hit redial on my phone because of all the digits I’ve punched in. So I dial again manually, silently subtracting from my life span all the minutes I will never get back. “If you know your party’s . . . .” Yeah, yeah, get on with it. I listen again to my options. This time I wait till the very end and learn that to speak to an operator, I may dial 0 at any time. Imay dial 0 at any time?
Don’t you mean at any time after hearing all this other crap? Why didn’t you tell me this first? Or might that require hiring another operator, thus raising my cable bill or health insurance premium .03 cents a month? I dial 0 and — mirabile dictu!
—a live person. “May I help you?” she asks, surprised that someone has actually gotten through and ordering a trace on my phone number. “Yes,” I answer. “I’d like to speak with someone in your homicide prevention department. I feel like murder.”
Film flam The absolute worst? Have you
ever tried to find out the number for a movie theater? Not an 800 number for the corporate office in Tennessee or a recording with show times, but a number for an actual person at the actual theater? It’s very nearly impossible. What is it that movie theaters are trying to hide?
Send a Kid to Camp Got your kids’ summer planned? I hope it involves some time in the great outdoors. You can help a needy kid from the Washington area get that by supporting Camp Moss Hollow. Make a tax-deductible gift by mailing a check or money order payable to “Send a Kid to Camp” to P.O. Box 96237, Washington, D.C. 20090-6237. Or contribute online by going to www.
washingtonpost.com/camp and clicking on the donation link.
kellyj@washpost.com
LOCAL DIGEST MARYLAND
St. Mary’s woman killed in car crash An 81-year-old St. Mary’s Coun-
ty woman was killed in a car crash Saturday night after she failed to yield to oncoming traffic, the county sheriff ’s office said. At 11:17 p.m. Saturday, Mary Butler of Mechanicsville was try- ing to turn north from St. John’s Road onto Three Notch Road in Hollywood. Her 2003 Nissan Sen- tra collided with a 2009 Toyota Camry traveling south.
Butler was pronounced dead at the scene. The Camry driver, Wade Wathen, 45, of Lexington Park, was flown to Prince George’s Hospital Center with in- juries that were not life-threat- ening, the sheriff ’s office said. — Ann Marimow
More free lunches in Montgomery
More children in Montgomery
County will be able to eat for free this summer as part of an expan- sion of a walk-in lunch program. The federally funded lunches, which are open to children not enrolled in summer camp or rec- reation programs, are at eight sites from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. each weekday through Aug. 20. About 30 percent of Montgom-
ery’s public school students qual- ify for free and reduced-price meals, and the walk-in sites have led to a summer participation in- crease of 34 percent since 2006. “Schools may be closed, but the need to feed children does not end,” said County Council mem-
ber Valerie Ervin (D-Silver Spring). To find lunch sites in Mary- land, call 877-731-9300 or visit
www.marylandpublicschools. org.
— Ann Marimow
Baltimore weekend violence continues
A shooting at the Inner Harbor
marked another violent weekend in Baltimore. On Sunday, police said they
were investigating two homicides and two suspicious deaths since Friday. There were also six non- fatal shootings, including the harbor attack, in which a 19-year- old man was wounded. Ten peo- ple were shot in Baltimore last weekend, and 10 were slain Me- morial Day weekend. — Associated Press
THE DISTRICT
Police investigate four shootings
One man was killed and three people were wounded in the Dis- trict on Sunday in four incidents, D.C. police said. Charles Bell, 29, of Southwest
Washington was found fatally shot about 3 a.m. in the unit block of Galveston Street SW. Another man was wounded in a shooting at Georgia Avenue and Morton Street NW about 3 p.m. The other shootings occurred near Kenilworth Avenue and 44th Street NE about 11 a.m. and Mississippi and Southern Av- enues SE about 1 p.m. — Ann Marimow and Rick Rojas
In a world filled with texts,
tweets and e-mails, amateur ra- dio operators know that when disaster strikes, they are some of the select few still capable of communicating when power grids and cellular signals fail. That’s why members of the
Loudoun Amateur Radio Group camped out on a farm in Lovetts- ville over the weekend for their annual Field Day, a competition in which amateur radio operators take to remote areas and sim- ulate emergency situations, then put their skills to the test. “The nice thing about ham ra- dio is that it’s completely inde- pendent of all of our other com- munication systems,” said Doug Johnson, the event’s coordinator. “You don’t realize how dependent you are until it fails, until the power is out and there is no dial tone.” Amateur radio operators live in a world where alphanumeric call signs take the place of cellphone numbers and sometimes replace the operators’ last names. Mem- bers’ badges at the event included
their call signs — such as Rick Miller’s “AI1V” — in large bold black type, and the operators’ first names were printed below in smaller red type. On Sunday, operators were busy not with text messaging and checking voicemails, but sending and receiving radio messages by voice, text, satellite and Morse code, which in the hands of the right operator is faster than text- ing. The operators’ objective in the contest is to try to contact as many other operators as they can in 24 hours, Johnson said. When the event closed Sunday after- noon, the group had contacted nearly 4,000 operators as far away as New Zealand. “It has a reputation as being
something your grandfather would have [done],” Johnson said, adding that some of the op- erators spent the weekend send- ing and receiving rapid-fire mes- sages using Morse code.
Despite how archaic the com-
munication method seems, it’s done a good job of keeping up with the times. Operators hooked radios and Morse code keys into laptops and used solar panels to
augment battery power. “Right now, we’re sending digi-
tal,” said Dodson Brown, the group’s treasurer. “The laptop has the ability to change all the set- tings in the transmitters and the receiver. It also formats the audio signal that goes through the mi- crophone.” Amateur radio operators are li- censed through the Federal Com- munications Commission and are organized under the Amer- ican Radio Relay League. Opera- tors typically work in more rural or remote locations to avoid in- terfering with police and emer- gency radio frequencies. More than 700,000 amateur ra- dio operators work nationwide, Johnson said, and the hobby can translate into public service or competition. Their efforts have aided emergency communica- tions after such events as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the earthquake in Haiti this year. Mike Lonneke, who has been a
ham radio operator for nearly 50 years, said it takes a strong will and patience to be successful. “If you want instant gratifica- tion, this is not the hobby for
you,” he said. “If you want to study and become proficient in something and serve other peo- ple, then that’s a hobby for you.” Lonneke’s father and uncle were ham radio operators during his childhood in Wichita, Kan. He remembers how thrilled he was when he first contacted his uncle, who lived in California, via ham radio. “The thought of being able to talk to him with a set that I had made with my own hands and a little wire antenna I had strung up in my back yard, it was just ab- solutely fascinating to me,” he said. Norm Styer, one of Lonneke’s friends and a fellow ham radio enthusiast, said he’s spoken with amateur radio operators in near- ly every country, if only momen- tarily. Styer and others said that aside from the public service and educational aspect of ham radio operation, the hobby has been a tool for enthusiasts to create bonds stretching as far as a radio frequency will take them. “We know how to work togeth- er and what we have to do and who we can count on,” Styer said. “We’re ready to go.”
lucasp@washpost.com Cuccinelli reaches out to business leaders cuccinelli from B1
support in Virginia is often es- sential to making policy, not to mention political careers. To win them over, Cuccinelli has an issue both agree on: his suit against the federal health-care overhaul that has caused deep anxiety in much of the business world. On Thursday, Cuccinelli and his top attorneys will face down the federal government for the first time in a court of law as a federal judge in Richmond hears oral arguments over a mo- tion to dismiss the suit. “The whole thing is just ludi- crous, what the federal govern- ment is forcing us, instead of asking us, to do,” said Fran Fish- er, chairman of the Fairfax chamber’s political action com- mittee, which had endorsed Democrat Stephen C. Shannon for the attorney general’s job. “To have someone like Ken champion us is a welcome relief. There are some things I don’t agree with him about, but over- all, I really appreciate that.” Cuccinelli has been traveling across the state and has met with 16 chambers of commerce. He has also been arranging cas- ual private meetings with busi- ness leaders to learn about their industries’ top issues. In a single week in March, he held a breakfast with Richmond developers, lunched with top ex- ecutives from Trane air condi- tioning and two Virginia con- struction giants, invited the Vir- ginia chief executive of HCA hospitals to his office for a meet- and-greet, and addressed the Virginia Association of Realtors, which did not endorse him last year. Last week, Microsoft sent a national government relations official to Richmond to meet with Cuccinelli over lunch at the swanky Jefferson Hotel. “Some of them were support- ive in the race, but they didn’t know me,” Cuccinelli said of his efforts. “I’m just trying to create channels of communication, so if they need it, they can use it. And if I need it, I can use it.”
‘Off his rocker’ image
Part of the effort is intended to reassure business leaders that he is a more sober, even- tempered leader than his repu- tation might suggest. As Cuccinelli put it: “If there’s
a conversation somewhere in Virginia, and Joe Blow says ‘Cuccinelli’s off his rocker,’ and one of the other people in the conversation happens to have been one of the people at one of these things, he can say, ‘You know, I don’t agree with him all the time. But he’s not off his rocker.’ That goes a long way.” The “off his rocker” impres- sion that Cuccinelli is trying to dispel stems from what many see as an abuse of his office to pursue his own ideologically driven causes. He has filed a lawsuit chal- lenging the federal govern- ment’s regulation of greenhouse gases. He is engaged in a court battle with the University of Vir- ginia, his alma mater and a cli- ent of his office’s, over his at- tempts to subpoena records of a former professor who studies global warming. He sparked outrage on college campuses af- ter he instructed public uni- versities to remove references to sexual orientation from policies barring discrimination. And he was mocked after choosing a historic version of the state seal for his staff lapel pin, one in
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port of cellphone executive Mark Warner helped return Democrats to the governor’s mansion in 2001 after almost a decade out of power. Likewise, business leaders rallied last year around the low-tax, economic development message of Robert F. McDonnell and helped hand the office back to the GOP. “Look — Ken believes the
BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Ken Cuccinelli II, center, talks with Carl McNair and Fran Fisher at a luncheon with the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce.
which the breast of the Greek goddess Virtus (or Virtue) is covered, unlike in the modern version. There were the YouTube mo- ments, too — video from a cam- paign event when he fretted about the government using So- cial Security numbers to track people and audio of him an- swering a hypothetical question about using the courts to chal- lenge President Obama’s citi- zenship. He has since said he be- lieves that Obama was born in the United States. “At first, it was like ‘Prome- theus Unbound’ — Cuccinelli unhinged,” said a senior Repub- lican strategist in Richmond, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “But maybe now he’s sowed his oats and he’s not the wild, crazy guy anymore. He sure doesn’t sound crazy when he talks about health care.” When Rick Cornwell, a top Ve-
rizon official, got a call from Cuccinelli’s office asking wheth- er he could set up a meeting for the attorney general with the company’s Virginia president, he said he was “pleasantly sur- prised.” In his 20 years with Verizon, a major Virginia employer and player on the political scene, he’d never had an attorney gen- eral ask for a meeting with no agenda other than to discuss business issues. “It was refreshing,” Cornwell
said. “It was exactly what they said it would be — a ‘tell us more about what you face as an indus- try’ meeting.” Democrats, who have been in- voking Cuccinelli’s name to raise campaign funds for months, laugh off the idea that he might make inroads with a business community that has been a key swing constituency in recent elections. Their sup-
Earth is 6,000 years old and flat, and that’s never going to change,” said Sen. Richard L. Saslaw of Fairfax, the state’s top elected Democrat. “They may find some common ground with him, but they may want to look around and see the atmosphere he’s creating in this state and ask him whether it’s good for at- tracting business.”
Competition ahead
Cuccinelli also continues to lag behind Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R) when it comes to ties with top corporate executives, partic- ularly in the Richmond area, where Bolling served as a local official and then a state senator. Although Cuccinelli has said he intends to run for a second term in 2013, he is widely perceived as a possible rival to Bolling, who plans to seek the Repub- lican gubernatorial nomination when McDonnell’s term ends. Virginia governors are prohib- ited from serving consecutive terms. “We’re very comfortable with [Bolling], and familiarity is al- ways helpful,” said Hugh Keogh, head of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce. “In large measure, Ken Cuccinelli is not a very well- understood person in the busi- ness community. Anything that will improve the understanding will help him.”
heldermanr@washpost.com
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