Of the eight jobs I was scheduled today 4 turned out to be not at home and two canceled. The first two jobs were in neighboring apartment complexes and turned out to be not at home. So I picked up an extra job. This was a house up north. The job was labeled as raise cable. With notes that there was no need to contact the customer. I looked and the cable was fine. No one was home so I called and left a message asking what they wanted me to do.
The next job was in the retirement community, but nobody was home here either. So I went to an apartment complex in the same neighborhood. I was flagged down by somebody who works with the company. He just wanted to introduce himself, he only started with the company recently. He works at improving our relations with certain apartment buildings in the area. The job itself turned out to be a place I had been to about a month ago. There was a little frail old woman here. The place wreaked of cat. She had changed the input of her TV. So I switched it back and left.
As I finishing up I got a call back. It turned out that the woman wanted me to shorten a cable that was in the living room. I also ended up giving them a new remote. After this I went to lunch.
After lunch I went to an apartment in the fancy shopping district. There was a woman here that was having some strange problems with her TV. She had a fancy HD set up and when people would move it looked like it was going fast or stuttering. I had not seen this before and wasn't sure what would cause this. Her set up was so nice that she was watching Empire Strikes Back and it was the clearest I had even seen it so much so that it looked almost 3-D. I felt like I had never seen it before. I was flipping the channels and came across some old Eddie Murphy film and it was the same effect. I didn't think it was our problem but I thought I would switch the box just in case. The only DVR I had in my truck turned out not to work. So I took her original box and left for a while then came back in as though it was a brand new box, then I hooked it back up. I'm getting a little too good at the bullshitting.
The next job was a big fancy house not too far away. An older guy answered the door and led me downstairs. The TV wasn't working at all. I looked over and noticed the cable wasn't plugged into the wall at all. He blamed it on the cat. I plugged it into the wall and everything was working fine.
The next job was another house. No one was here, so I headed to the next job. This was another house. The woman here said several techs have been out and no one fixed the problem. Her reception was terrible. It took me a while to figure out, but whoever installed the original line really fucked it up, so I had to replace the whole line. Afterwords she was extremely happy.
My last job was a unit in some row housing. The door was answered by an old white woman who was hunched over. There was also a old black man here. The second I entered the guy started to speak gibberish at me. He would mumble and drool and every so often I could make a word or two, but it didn't seem to make sense. He would also follow me around. He would sit down and talk and then get louder and angrier and then get up and start flailing. I was afraid he would attack me while I was working. At one point I went into another room, I turned around and he was standing there waving his prescription bottles at me. I needed to install a phone outlet in one of the rooms, but there was no wiring, so I just stung along a really long phone chord and tapped it down so no one would trip on it. As I was leaving another black woman showed up as well as a young black man who gave them some packs of cigarettes and some change.