Yesterday they had me doing installs in the southwest part of town. The first job was at a house. There was a nice old lady here. In fact the few times I've been in this area, the people all seem old and retired. The woman was nice but very nosey. She asked me questions about every little thing I was doing. I had to go into the neighbor's yard across the way to get to the pole. When I got back to her house, there was a guy across the street with no shirt on pulling mushrooms out of his yard and throwing them into the street. I headed back inside. In her basement there was a deer head mounted on the wall, for some reason I only run into this sort of thing in this part of town. While I was there working she got a phone call from my company asking if I had shown up yet, when I had been there for at least 2 hours.
The next job was much further south. I've always been shocked that this area is covered by my office when there is another office just a mile or two away. There was another old lady here. She was little confused about things, because her daughter ordered it and is paying the bills. She, like the last woman, was very curious about everything I was doing. She has these little candy dishes in her living room which I thought was such a stereotypical Grandmother thing to do, it was awesome. She had one of the nicest crawl-spaces I had seen. It was spacious and lit. It even had ground covering. Since these jobs entailed a bit more than what was on paper I was starting to run a little later than I wished. I skipped lunch and went to my next job.
The next one was near my first one. I was here to install phone in an office that was in the garage. When I saw this I was relieved because it looked much harder on paper. But I ended up spending 3 hours here anyways. The business was home appraisals. When I was working behind the building I noticed a bunch of little insects scurrying about the wall, but when I looked closer I saw that they were in fact 20 or so little baby spiders that must have just hatched. Inside I was hooking up the phone, when I realized that the alarm they have set up for their office, was never properly hooked up. So I ended up hooking it up for them, which is what took me so long.
By the time I got to my next job I was still on time, but had to resign myself to the fact that I would be getting home late today. When I got there there was a couple of hispanic teenagers there. I told them that Iw as there to install the phones and they said someone else had already done it. My paperwork said that there was a contractor who was going to go out there and install the internet, but this person went ahead and did the phone as well. I made sure that everything was working and I took off. I guess the contractor didn't see that they were two different jobs.
Starting yesterday I'm on call for the next week so I decided to see if there is more work to be had, because I would hate to go home only to be called out again. I picked up one more job that was in a condo downtown. I showed up and couldn't get a hold the customer. Then right as I was about to leave a guy on crutches who had been hanging out outside asked me who I was looking for. I told him and he said that was him. So he led me inside and explained what the problem was. He was having issues with his phone. I brought up a spare phone, and it looked like it was the phone itself and not the service. So I canceled the job and went home.