Wednesday

They scheduled me with installs in the south east part of town today. My first job was at an apartment complex right next to a busy street and the Interstate. When I showed up no one was there. I then found out that the kid moving in here doesn't even have the key yet. He wasn't supposed to get it until 9 am. The people in the leasing office were nice, they let me in to do my job. The kid is going to college here in town. He was telling me that his dad owns a Telecom company in Nevada. He said he frequently works for him burying fiber-optic cable.
The next job was an apartment complex further north. There was a Hispanic man here with a kid. I was here to install video. There was only one outlet in the apartment and he wanted his TV two bedrooms away to be hooked up. Fortunately it looks like someone else already had this idea because there was already holes in the wall. So I just had to thread the cable through the holes. Which was easy enough. The little girl kept following me around, at one point she asked if she was getting cable. I told her to ask her dad, then she said he's not her dad, that's her mom's friend. He said she was grounded so she's not getting cable right now.
The next job was a house near the university. There was at least four guys living here. They wanted me to run a new outlet in one of the rooms. They said other techs were here earlier this morning to fix a problem with the Internet. So I ran the outlet while they sat around and watched TV. Everything from game shows, Springer and whatever movies they could find.
I skipped my lunch to head to my next job. This was an apartment complex that was right near where two Interstates come together. I was here to install all three products. The couple moving in here just moved from Maryland. The previous tenant here had dish, so I had to spend some time trying to figure out how the place was wired. Which required me to look in the attic of the unit. I had the TV and the Internet working but I ran into the most unusual problem with the phones. I could get them working but I couldn't get them to ring. As long as it was plugged directly into the EMTA itself it would ring. I could hook up the kitchen jack and it would still ring, but if I hooked up the next phone jack in the chain it would no longer ring. I must have spent two hours trying to figure this out, to no avail. I eventually told the customer what was going on and that they should buy a base station and satellite phones.
My last job was in the same area but a little more south. This was another apartment complex. The guy here just moved from Mississippi to work at a hospital here. I tried to rush through the install as quickly as possible because I wanted to get home. The only major trip up, was that the box wasn't working. So I upsold him to a DVR, since that was my last normal cable box. He was talking about HD the whole time, so it wasn't that much of a stretch. i finished the job and went home.