Still Going…

Last Updated on December 23, 2009

There was an Amber Alert issued early Sunday morning. I know this because my cable system keeps interrupting the shows I’ve been watching all morning with a crawl that appears over a black screen and wipes out all of the audio and video, to direct me over to Channel 60, a billboard channel that gives basically no information other than the counties involved and that it is in effect until 10:09am.

There’s no mention of what child may have been abducted. There’s no mention of where it might have happened, or what the suspect or his (or her) vehicle looks like.

I signed on to my work’s email system to see what was going on, and I saw the initial Amber Alert notification from 2:55am.

Then I noticed another email that seemed fairly important.

That was the notification, sent at 4:57am, that canceled the alert.

It would be one thing if the cable system had bothered to program the information into its system to just expire at 10:09am, which is when they seem to think it should have expired.

But at 10:15am, they ran the same crawl. Again. So it’s clear that they didn’t even put that much effort into it.

If there were an active Amber Alert, that would naturally be much more important than any show I was watching because a child could be in genuine danger. But when the alert has been killed for six hours and I’m still being told about it like there is some active police investigation, that’s a problem.

If I have to sit through alerts for non-existent Amber Alerts all afternoon, somebody’s getting a loud complaint on Tuesday.