I realize this is a bit blasphemous, but I've always considered any work that any of us do in broadcast journalism to be at the whim of what I've called the "Sony Gods".

I use "Sony" in that phrase just as a representative of a major company which manufacturers equipment for us to use in our business.

We're at the beck and call of any number of pieces of technology on a daily basis. Whether it's the computers to write the scripts and time the shows, to the cameras to shoot the video, computers to edit them, production control rooms and studio cameras to get us on the air, all the way to the transmitters to send the signal out over the air to you.

It all involves millions of dollars worth of equipment on which we depend to work on a daily basis.

As anyone who watches television news on a regular basis knows, it doesn't always work.

One piece of technology we utilize on almost a daily basis are microwave trucks. They are vehicles we can drive anywhere and park, and set up an electronic signal to a receive point and do what we call a "live shot". You've seen many on the air. They frequently are routine, but making pictures fly through the air is never a guaranteed event.

We have (had as you'll soon find out) three of those trucks. They are handy for us because our reporters and photographers can actually work in the field. They can write, edit the video, feed it in to the station and to that "live shot" without ever having to return to the newsroom.

As I said, we had three. One of them burned this afternoon. The trucks are normal consumer vans which are transformed by one of several companies into live trucks by jamming them with a lot of equipment. The wiring is massive. It has transmitters to send the signal, edit stations, room to write and work and, of course, a place where you can drive the truck. Most of our news employees go through extensive training to use them.

One of our trucks has been out of service for a few months after our engineering staff found some suspect wiring in it. It's a fairly old truck we inherited from one of our sister stations. They've been rewiring it. And at the same time, I've been putting a bit of pressure on them to have it ready for election night. It was part of my plans for that night.

This afternoon, while sitting in our front parking lot on Sixth Avenue, the truck caught fire and the interior was burned well beyond repair. I've put a couple of pictures here on the inside of the truck.

Very luckily, no one was injured. The truck wasn't even moving when the fire broke out.

It will cause me to revamp the election night plans, but we do have backup and it shouldn't change what you see that night.

But it's a piece of equipment we've relied on that we can now scratch off our inventory.

Farewell, Unit 81. Thanks for your service.

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