Let me tell you a story.

There is a shortwave radio station known as WWRB. Its owner-operator seemed to have gone missing. The station starting broadcasting an open carrier without modulation roughly one week ago. By Monday concerns were raised that nobody could seem to contact the station's owner-operator. Several calls were made to the station. They went to voicemail.

Eventually I was the person in the group of concerned folks who broke down and called local law enforcement. One of the bad things about the line of work I am in as a civil servant is that I have occasions where I must request "welfare checks" on individuals. Local law enforcement couldn't report that they found the person in question. An actual beat cop rode out to the station and then had to develop leads to see if they could locate the owner's address.

The monitoring group that I was part of also checked records since the person in question was a pilot. We couldn't find any news of a crash. Any tail numbers for planes that we knew of came up as not flying according to record searches.

Late Tuesday into early Wednesday the station appeared to come back to life. Nobody in the monitoring group is sure who is running it but it is up. Normal programming has resumed compared to the empty unmodulated signal.

A huge problem is that I shouldn't have been the one running the checks. This is something that rightfully should have been handed over to an inspector in the FCC Enforcement Bureau. After all, they get paid to do that and get paid at a higher pay grade than I do when I am not stuck on furlough. Due to all the recent concern over the fate of net neutrality in the United States, the FCC phone system is effectively dead. I wasn't ready to declare a "safety of life" emergency on the IVR phone tree due to the sheer metric tonne of paperwork that that would generate but every other option led to the IVR tree hanging up on me. Getting an inspector out there with an axe & flashlight along with local law enforcement to back the inspector up would've solved the problem quite a bit sooner.

The day on which we commemorate the attack on Pearl Harbor in the United States of America is apparently going to be one of coordinated protests over net neutrality. The FCC has already been backed into a corner and is becoming functionally crippled by various acts of protest. I got lucky that we didn't stray into "safety of life" issues in this case.

For the next person who may have such issues, I hope they find mercy. Wireless Priority Service and Government Emergency Telecommunications Service are both outbound systems to break through logjams like people tying up switchboards. Thankfully somebody thought up such things in the 1970s to prevent denial of service attacks on telephone systems at government agencies.