My first job of the day was a house in a gated community. I was here to put a box on an account that had cable but no boxes. An older lady answered to door. She showed me to the bedroom where she wanted the box installed. Her husband eventually showed up. He had a lot of questions. He seemed older than she. They both moved around very slowly. Once I had the box set up they had a lot of questions. I would explain things generally like I normally do, but when they asked questions I quickly understood that they knew nothing about this system and everything had to be explained in minute detail. What would normally take 5 minutes, now took over 30.
When I finally left there I headed to a town home complex. A black woman answered the door. On the couch in the living room was a man asleep. The room was dark but the TV was on. She showed me upstairs to where the computer was. She said that she is constantly losing her Internet and would have to reset her router to get it back. This was obviously the router. I looked around and found a splitter that could be replaced. The signal on the modem was low, so I tried to re-rout things to improve the signal, but in the end I explained that it was the router.
The next job was a house to the north. A white man let me in. He was complaining that his modem constantly resets itself and that he has had this problem for three years. He would just replace the modem. I was trying to figure out where the cable in the room goes by looking behind a bookcase. To do this I had to go around a birdcage, but for some reason I didn't see the parrot on top of the cage. Until it was about 2 inches from me and tried to take a bite of my jacket. The customer then said that the bird would indeed attack me so he took it into the other room. I was then able to follow the cable, which goes into the crawl space. I had top replace a couple connectors and a piece of bad cable, but none of this was the problem. I told the guy this was a network issue and that I would turn the job over to the appropriate people. I had to take a look at what was going on up on the pole, and then I turned over to our network people.
I then did a disconnect in the same neighborhood. Then I was given an install in an apartment complex a little ways away. This is a pretty ghetto apartment complex. A tall young white man answered the door. I was here to install TV and the Internet. He had is own modem. The job was pretty easy. He told about a friend of his who gets drunk and orders pay per view movies and then passes out. He'll do this several nights in a row with the same movie driving up his cable bills. As I was finishing up the guys friend (same guy who orders the movies) showed up and exclaimed, "I'm surprised you have running water let alone cable!" I then went to lunch.
After lunch I got an Install. I was here to do Internet and phone. Two middle aged Hispanic men lived here. One knew English pretty well, the other didn't speak at all. The job was easy, I set up the Emta at the only outlet next to the front door. I spoke to the guy about getting a router so he could use his laptop upstairs.
My last job was over by the University. This was a duplex. I arrived right when the woman who lives here showed up. It looked like her parents were here watching her children. She said that her phones would go out for hours at a time. Sometimes it would come back but with a lot of noise on the line. I looked downstairs and everything looked fine. I looked outside and saw a line exposed to the elements and had obviously taken on some water damage. I figured out which line that was and eliminated it from the system. Since everything was working when I showed up, I hoped that was the problem.