I started my day by going to a house. This house looked like it needed a paint job, the front door was a little rickety. I knocked but no one answered. I called and a guy answered and said that everything was working so I canceled the job.
Then I headed to an apartmetn building for elderly folk. There was an old Indian lady here. Her place had a lot of photographs of her various children and grandchildren. She was having TV troubles. After being on for about 30 seconds the screen starts to break into horizontal lines, then it starts to look as though the picture is tilting away from you. It looked like that old Tron game from the 80's. I told her it was the TV, she needed a new one.
The next job was the ghetto apartment complex. There was a young woman here with here child. The place was extremely cluttered. She apologized for the mess. It turns out she works for the company. She was having TV problems. She had changed the input on the TV. I just had to turn it back. She felt really bad that it was so simple.
The next job was in the retirement community. There was a little old couple here. They were only getting the local channels. They just got a new TV over the weekend. I knew right away it was going to be simple. I just had to change the TV from antennae to cable. I tried to explain what had happened and how to correct it themselves, but I wasn't sure if they got it or not.
Next I headed to resort town. A young woman answered the door in her PJ's and she apologized for this fact. There was an empty bud light can as well as an ashtray full of cigarette butts on the table. They had pulled some of the cables off of the back of the box and hooked them back up wrong. So I put it back together, but the box still wasn't working quite right. She said it's always done that, she just ignored it. I replaced the box anyways, with one that works better.
After lunch I headed to an apartment complex. I was here to pick up some equipment, but no one was home. So I headed to another job. This was further north. There was another young woman here. Her Internet wasn't working at all. I switched some things around outside hoping that would help, but it didn't. So I replaced the modem. But for some reason it wouldn't let me set it up. I called tech support and it turned out that something was wrong with the system itself. They put me on hold. I was struggling to stay awake so I started to play spider solitare on the customer's computer. Eventually they told me it was going to be a while, so I should move on and finish the job later.
The next job was at a nice looking old house. An elderly woman answered the door. She had one of those seats that take you upstairs. She showed me her TV. She said she didn't think her son hooked it up right. She kept saying he ripped something out. I think she was very confused in general. As far as I could tell she had never had a box before and for some reason got one, and her son set it up. But He took off before explaining it to her. I changed the input and tried to explain everything to her. She was being a little difficult. She didn't like the idea of having a new remote. I tried to explain how to use everything but I don't think it sunk in. I looked out back and saw an old line to the house, which I didn't necessarily feel like replacing. Everything was working fine, so I canceled the job and moved on.
The next job was on the same street but further north. This was another house. A nice lederly woman answered the door. She showed me to the bedroom and said that last night this TV would break into wavy vertical lines. I couldn't get it to happen again, but I told her that this was probably a sign that her TV was going to give out. She joked about how she just got a new flat screen from her children for Christmas and she doesn't think she could get another new TV so quick. On the way out she offered me some candy.
My last job was only a few blocks away. This was a large house. They were remodeling the front of it. A guy answered the door and showed me his TV in the bedroom. It didn't have any signal. We checked the basement, and still no signal. We looked outside and I could see that someone had disconnected the line. I went up there and there was a note from one of our network techs saying to call him before hooking it back up. I called him and he said there was some noise on the line that was backfeeding into the network. But I checked and found nothing. So I hooked it back up. I gave the guy a new box, because he didn't like the way the old one looked. We talked about about the house. He said it was built in 1896. He showed me a picture, showing only the house in a field, with a trolley line being built in front of it. He said this used to be a town called Mapleton and the street out front was the mainstreet. He even found an old token for the trolley in his garden out back.