The night the transmitter froze and nobody noticed
Eleven minutes of a room in Amsterdam, a flat line in the level file, and a ten-euro part from 2011.
Output level · 22:00 — 00:00Flat for 11 minutes
22:0022:4100:00
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22:41TueOff air
The relay clicks and does not come back
It had been clicking since spring. Nobody wrote it down, because it clicked and then it worked, and a thing that works is easy to leave alone for another week. Somewhere between the last record and the one after it, it stopped.
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22:5211 min laterBack
What actually went out
Not silence in the technical sense. The desk kept feeding the transmitter, and what the transmitter modulated was the room: the fridge in the corner, the tram on Prinsengracht, a chair moving.
“Genuinely thought it was some minimal thing you had dug up. Slightly embarrassed, mostly delighted.” — Joost M.
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09:00WedFound
The rack on the studio floor
A relay from 2011, never meant to sit in a warm cupboard for nine years. The contacts had pitted enough that a cold start no longer closed the circuit. We found it because the archive recorder writes a level file for every hour, and that hour was flat.
- PartOMRON G2R · 2011
- Cost€ 10
- Cupboard8° too warm
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16:10ThuFixed
Four things changed
Two of them are parts, two are habits — and the habits are the ones that would have caught it on the night.
- 01 · doneRelay replaced, spare dated in the drawer.
- 02 · doneSignal alarm rings the desk phone after 20 seconds of nothing.
- 03 · nightlyBackup line checked before the first record.
- 04 · nightlyCupboard door open after 22:00 — eight degrees cooler.
- 11 MINOf silence
- 10 HUntil we found it
- 41 HUntil it was fixed
- 0Listeners lost
We are keeping the recording, filed in the archive as ELEVEN MINUTES OF NOTHING. Two hosts have already asked to play parts of it.
Fourteen repliesNEWEST FIRST · WE READ EVERY ONE
Joost M. 13 AUG · 09:12
I was the one who asked about the label. Genuinely thought it was some minimal thing you had dug up. Slightly embarrassed, mostly delighted.
12 LIKED
Ines RoaHOST 13 AUG · 09:40
Not embarrassing at all — you were the reason we found it before the morning. The message came in before the level file did.
8 LIKED
Sanne Vos 13 AUG · 11:02
Please do put it out on purpose once. An hour of the studio at 2am, no records, announced in advance. I would sit through all of it.
21 LIKED
Anonymous 13 AUG · 14:37
The checklist point is the real lesson here. Everyone monitors that they are transmitting; almost nobody monitors that they are being received.
4 LIKED