I started the day at a house. Even-though it's listed as an apartment it's actually a small community of houses which is right next to one of the biggest roads in town, and yet if you didn't know where to look, you would completely miss it. The place was owned by a nice old couple. The place was filled with impressionistic looking art work. Of course the TV wasn't acting up when I got there, so I looked around and replaced a few things.
Afterwards I went to an apartment complex for retirees. The woman who lived there had an accent the seemed british with a hint of scottish, but very aristocratic sounding. She had a much nicer apartment than the ones I'm used to seeing in there buildings. I tried finding the problem but nothing was showing itself. After a while I became convinced it was the cable itself, so I replaced it but the lady was convinced it was the box, so I replaced it to appease her.
After those jobs i was running a little behind. The next job was another apartment, but I was there do something about a cable that was hanging outside the building which was not something I do so I quickly set up an appointment for a different crew of people to come a deal with it so I could go to my next job.
The next appointment was in the next apartment building over, which is always nice and convenient. This building in particular has a lot of immigrants from Africa, India and the Middle East. I enjoy coming here because you can always smell someone cooking something fantastic. The lady who answered the door on this job though was white and very old. Then when I came in I noticed two more elderly ladies one sitting behind the other smiling at me. The one that was closer had squinting eyes and a large smile and looked like something out of a Daniel Clowes comic. The whole scene creeped me out. Apparently the one in back was the mother of the other two women. Only one woman would talk to me directly the other two would coax her to ask me something. The problem here was that they had it hooked up wrong. An easy fix. I got out of there quick. I took a short lunch and went to my first afternoon job. This was a house in a very nice part of town. My paperwork said apartment but this was a house. Though the man and woman here seemed to approach each other with a formality that made me think they were not together. There was actually no problem here, everything was working fine so I cancelled it.
Next I went to another house, but I a different area. This area is quickly being known for it's scrape offs, but this house hasn't been touched yet. The man was nice, he said he's an auto broker. He was accidentally disconnected so I needed to hook him back up. When I was checking the levels inside I made the mistake of mentioning that his levels were low. So I had to spend the next half hour fussing around to try and improve the signal to make the customer happy.
The next house was in the same neighborhood and was a scrape off. The place smelled of Italian (my guess is Baked Zitit), the was a made going around cleaning things. They had one of those universal remotes that controls everything. The problem was with one of her TVs. It was a piece of shit but I somehow got it to function better, though it probably went back to the way it was once I left.
My last job was in the same area still. The door was answered by an older gentleman with a cane. His wife was sitting down, she had a walker with her. When I first heard her speak I didn't notice, but later one it became apparent that she had some sort of impairment or condition. Her speech was strained, and her husband spoke of her being in a wheel chair and how he would have to bathe her. They weren't getting most of their channels and I narrowed it down to the pedestal in the neighbors yard. There was a four foot chain link fence that separated the two yards and I ripped my jeans trying to jump over it.
As I was on this job I was called by a customer from earlier in the week who was having problems, so I need to go back there. I had to get some white cable from another tech, then I went there and replaced a whole bunch of their wiring. They have this newborn who is sitting in a swing and had these huge eyes starring blankly out. This made me think how surreal it must be to be a newborn, to experience everything for the first time. As I was heading home I was sitting at a stop sign and I saw a fox on the other side of the street. A bus passed me by and when it was gone so was the fox.