Satellite Glitch Does a Number on Pagers, Pumps and More

Jim Smith had little patience for an out-of-whack satellite if it meant he would have to wait in a cashier’s line to fill up his gas tank.

Besides, using his cash card at the pump simultaneously nets him frequent flier miles.

So he left.

“I don’t have the time to mess around with inadequacies,” the 68-year-old from Paso Robles said as he stopped--albeit briefly--at a Ventura gas station Wednesday morning. “I knew that the satellite was beginning to roll, but I didn’t think it was going to affect me.”

Few did.

Yet whatever sent the Galaxy IV satellite into a tizzy Tuesday afternoon had plenty of people reverting to old-fashioned inconveniences.

Take the Ventura doctor and his wife reliant on a pager for after-hours calls. They stayed up checking voice mail messages all night in case a few seriously ill patients called.

There was the young woman who just two weeks ago took a job handling the emergency phone lines at the pager company.

Good training, she quipped.

With its National Public Radio feed cut, KCLU-FM radio in Thousand Oaks was forced to tap into a high-quality phone line system feeding audio through a chain of Los Angeles-area radio stations.

Even the illegal drug dealers and escort services likely felt the pinch, authorities said.

By midday Wednesday, pager service was gradually starting to be restored as companies rerouted service to other satellites.

But service remained spotty.

FBI division chief Gary Auer’s pager worked fine by late morning, for instance. But Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter’s still didn’t.

No matter.

Law enforcement officials said patrol officers rely more on radio communications than pagers, and any need to contact administrators and detectives--or amass a SWAT team or bomb squad--would only mean a return to the traditional phone tree.

The loss of pager systems likely meant a greater burden on those on the other side of the law--drug dealers and call girls who often rely on the electronic leashes to arrange their illicit deeds.

“It could have a big impact on narcotics dealers because a lot of these guys do market by pager,” sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Keith Parks said.

Meanwhile, although the rolling satellite proved inconvenient, physicians at area hospitals reported no problems from the pager shutdowns.

Still, for Ventura family practitioner Dr. Barry Cogen and his wife Wendy, the loss of pager service cut their after-hours connection with patients.

Long ago, the couple chose not to rely on an answering service because they wanted patients to be able to reach the doctor directly. So they opted for a pager.

Luckily, their pager had a voice mail function. With a few seriously ill patients on their hands, they checked their voice mail every 10 or 15 minutes throughout the night Tuesday and Wednesday.

“I’m tired,” Wendy Cogen said about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, about an hour after the pager service was restored. “Our lives just seem to depend on it so much, and you have to realize you can’t rely on electronics all the time.”

Franklin Sgaraglino of Advantage Cellular & Paging in Ventura said like the Cogens, many of his customers relied on their pagers’ voice mail function to wait out the crisis.

“Sad day for the industry,” he said. “Nobody ever thought this would happen.”

The business had been inundated with more than 100 calls from customers since the night before, said Misty Ortiz, 19, who started her job fielding hotline calls at the company just two weeks ago.

“It’s been good training for me,” she said. “I’ve been handling five calls at one time. For the most part, everyone’s been pretty understanding. They’re disappointed, of course. It’s their job, and it’s affecting them.”

One unexpected result, though, was that normally fierce paging company competitors had banded together, Sgaraglino said.

Suspecting that uncontrollable space junk was responsible for the problem, Sgaraglino said paging companies were busy helping each other redirect satellite dishes on the ground toward different satellites in orbit.

“Today we’re embracing the competition,” Sgaraglino said. “Our common foe being space junk.”

* MAIN STORY: A1