For whatever reason today I was in the best mood I've been in for a while, maybe it's because this is my Friday and i get the next two days off or maybe it's because I actually got some sleep last night. Either way I don't care I just hope it sticks around for a while.
My first job was at an apartment complex I was at yesterday. When I showed up a guy was hanging out on the steps. He left after a little while then, someone else came out of their apartment and sat in the same spot. All the while no one was answering the door. Then some kids were out by the steps and someone from another building walked up and the woman came out of nowhere, and they were all hanging out on the stairs. No one showed up so I called it not at home and went to the next job.
The next job was large house across the street from a school. My job here was to move an outlet, because the previous tech drilled the hole through a heat duct! The guy who answered the door was round black fellow. He showed me where to work. A kid (his son?) came down stairs in his bathrobe and started playing some role playing game on his gamecube. The job didn't take too long, I didn't interact with them too much.
the next job was in a fancy apartment above the ritziest shopping area in the city. When I got inside I realized I've been in this apartment before. They wanted me to hook up their DVD player, but it was hooked up, so I told them that the DVD player wasn't working. As I was leaving I noticed a blind woman across the street and her dog had stopped because she was about to walk into a construction site. She looked confused about this, so I went over and asked where she was trying to go. It turned out to be across the street so I led her there.
My next job was a little closer to where I live. This apartment building is for retirees. This particular gentleman opened the door with no shirt on. He had a scar going down the center of his body. He had a bunch of Tom Clancy and W.E.B. Griffin novels. As I was helping to fix his cable he started telling me about how he only watches Fox news anymore, because everyone else has a liberal bias and he wants news without any slant. He wants to make up his own mind. He talked about how he used to watch CNN until they started lying. While I was waiting for this to work we were watching a history Channel program about roads and highways. He mentioned he was a trucker in the 50's and how rough the roads used to be until Eisenhower built the highway system. Accept rout 66, which was alright back then. He said he did some trucking in the 60's and it was much better. Then he mentioned in '47 he did trucking on what he called the Alcan, which I guess is the highways between Alaska and Canada. He said in the Yukon it would get to 65 below. They had to have gas heaters in their truck incase they broke down, so they wouldn't freeze to death. They all had blow torches to defrost truck parts that had frozen. As I was leaving I ran into a rather talkative fellow in the elevator. He was wearing an ascot and would hold his throat when he talked which tipped me off that he must have had a tracheotomy. His voice sounded good, but if you listened closely you could a machine like hum when he talked. And when he didn't hold his throat it would make a terrible wheezing sound. He talked about how he's been going around hooking up his friends cable boxes for them and how he's been getting frustrated at trying to explain to them how the stuff works. I told him I knew how he felt.
It was about lunch time but I wasn't hungry so I went to my next job. It was an apartment building only two block away from where I live. The door was answered by a very nice old black woman. The problem was that she had the box hooked into her antennae instead of cable and she accidentally took away the cable line. I explained this and we grab the cable line and hooked it back up. She got mad at herself for this, because she had the cables specially tacked along the walls. She seemed very capable in terms of doing handy work around her apartment. While she was taking part of the line back she start cussing, but in her own way, so as to try an avoid any serious words I guess. Then she started singing some gospel hymn under her breath, but enough so I could hear the melody and some of the words, and I have to say it was beautiful. I didn't say anything about it, maybe because it seemed kind of private, like my hearing it was voyeuristic or something. She mentioned she was going to do a lot of traveling. She was going to take her great-grandchildren (she did not seem that old!) to California to visit their grandmother, then she was going to go to some other places as well. I got most of her channels working but a couple were still missing, I went to replace the splitter when I noticed it was hooked up backwards. After that everything worked fine.
After this I found a bathroom and ate some lunch. I was still ahead of time so I called around to see who was home. So next I went to a nice large house in the country club area. The woman their was a nice old white lady, who seemed very proper. there was an old black man their and they were talking about interracial couples they know. She had tried to hook up the boxes herself but when one wasn't working she gave up. The people on the phone told her to hook each up individually, when the truth is they won't work correctly until all of them are working correctly. So I was going around hooking each of them up, when she brought to me a toner and said the last tech out there, who was there months ago left it. This was great because I lost part of mine and had yet to replace it. They give you a lot of shit for losing tools and I had already lost one of these, so i was working without it for the time being. While I was working on the job I got a call on my personal cell phone and recognized it as being from Albuquerque. I thought to myself, "My friends john & Aubrey are in town, so who would be calling from Albuquerque?" so I didn't answer. Then afterwards it dawned on me that it was my mom who had just moved down there, so I called her back. After I got all the TV's working I proceeded to explain On Demand to her, and it was like I opened a whole new world to her. She joked that she may never leave the house.
Next I went to a house that is right around the corner from a coffee shop i used to work at is. It's also right near where some friends of mine live. If I had time and wasn't in such a rush to get home (this is my Friday after all), I may have stopped by either, but did not. This was a nice older house, with the little button light switches. They only had one TV and it was acting up. It turned out to be the line to the house, which I needed to replace. The day had been really easy until now too. I guess I actually have to do some work. I really didn't talk to the guy much, I just took off when I was done.
My last job was right in between the shopping area from before and the country club area. It was part of a series of town-homes on a really busy street. Theses were really tall, really nice town-homes. From inside you don't hear the street at all. The door was answered by a really old lady. She kept mentioning that she is a teacher and that she doesn't like technology. I was there to explain how to work her TV's. She told that kids today area illiterate and this is because of TV and computer. She told me a story about the fact she saw OMG on a paper and had to ask one of her students what it meant. She also mentioned that she teaches citizenship classes and she doesn't know that if the recent failing of the immigration bill will be a good or bad thing. She described how paranoid people were, that they were afraid that showing up to class would single them out or if they made a phone call to Mexico their call would be intercepted and they would be sent back. She also talked about how complicated things are today and when she was growing up all they worried about was Hitler, now we worry about everything and it's all because of the internet.