Comcast Tech To the Rescue

Six Silver Spring, Md., residents were able to escape their burning apartment building a week ago Saturday night, in part due to the assistance of a Comcast technician who stopped to render aid and was assisted by other passers-by.

Technician Jorge Rivera, who works in technical operations, told The Wire he was traveling to a 10 p.m. appointment in the city Dec. 6 when traffic slowed and he spotted smoke drifting from a building to his right. He then saw a group of people trapped on a third-floor balcony, who, at that moment, dropped a baby girl to observers below.

“As soon as I saw that baby girl coming down, I stopped and grabbed my ladder,” Rivera said in an interview.

Observers had been unsuccessfully trying to remove a ladder from a parked service truck near the building when Rivera arrived. With adrenaline pumping at that moment, it was like his ladder “weighed nothing,” the tech said.

He and other citizen rescuers got the ladder deployed and two more children and the adults climbed down to safety, he said. Some people took pictures, others shot video of the fire, he said.

“I’m grateful for the people that actually helped,” Rivera said. “I’m really proud of them. We were just reacting.”

After the escapees assured him they were unhurt, Rivera went on to complete the rest of the night’s appointments.

He notified his supervisor what had happened and the dispatchers moved some of his jobs to compensate for the time spent on the rescue, he said.

At the next appointment, not far away, the resident asked, “Hey, there’s a fire over there. Did you know that?” Rivera just said “yes,” and went on with his assigned duties.

UBS Mood Subdued, But Not Attendance

The atmosphere (unsurprisingly) was downbeat at the UBS Media and Communications conference last week in New York. Several of the CEOs who presented spent a good amount of their time just trying to calm investor fears about the worsening economy.

But at least they weren’t preaching to empty seats.

Despite obvious belt-tightening at media companies and financial-services firms — the typical audience at the annual conference — practically every session The Wire attended was standing-room only. (Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei’s presentation on Dec. 10 had a few empty seats, but that may have been due more to the 8 a.m. start time than anything else.)

Aryeh Bourkoff, one of the moderators at the conference and UBS vice chairman of Technology, Media and Telecoms (TMT) Investment Banking, unofficially pegged the conference attendance at about 1,700. That’s more than came last year, even though it’s a time when travel budgets are being severely pinched.

Bourkoff credited the turnout to the number of CEOs making presentations — including NBC’s Jeff Zucker; Viacom’s Philippe Dauman and Time Warner Inc.’s Jeff Bewkes — and their frank depiction of the current economic climate

“It was the most candor that I have seen from management teams about challenges — and opportunities — than I have seen in recent years,” Bourkoff said in an e-mail.

White House Gets HD Close-Up on C-SPAN

The story goes that First Lady Laura Bush was so taken with C-SPAN’s original HD series, The Capitol, she readily agreed to have the public-affairs channel’s cameras in for an in-depth portrait of the White House.

The result — The White House: Inside America’s Most Famous Home — debuts on C-SPAN Sunday, Dec. 14, at 9 p.m., kicking off a week of pre-inauguration “White House Week” fare.

A 15-minute preview The Wire screened had some fascinating bits about Harry Truman adding a balcony onto the South Portico — outraging purists but delighting every White House resident since — and then basically rebuilding the structurally creaky residence. Also Laura Bush is a great tour guide, as Michelle Obama has learned.

The doc will be available to C-SPAN affiliates for on-demand (including HD VOD) offerings starting Jan. 1, via TVN Entertainment.