Four hours with Comcast

The cable guy finally showed late yesterday afternoon. Unlike the last time I had one of these guys over, I still had a ladder when he left. So that's nice. His name was Carlos.

It took him four hours to diagnose the problem I'd been having for almost a year. He was a pretty good sport about it all, since he hadn't been expecting anything complicated. I think he thought, as I did, that he'd hook up the box and be gone in the space of 20 minutes or so.

We kept thanking one another for our respective displays of patience.

The problems with the signal were clearly pissing him off. He kept thinking of new things to try, though, even though each one seemed to give me either the cable tv or internet access, but never both simultaneously. I sensed several times that he was very near to giving up and calling in another service order to make someone else come and deal with all of this, but he kept at it. He indicated that if things weren't working when he left, he would not be paid for his time.

In the end, he had to run an entirely new cable from somewhere outside and into my apartment. I told him that I was pretty sure that the last guy had done that, and he showed me several splices in the cable I had, and further explained that my existing cable came from at least three different spools, which is apparently a bad thing.

He ripped out my frankencable and ran a new line along my building in the dark. Neither of us had a flashlight, and he did a lot of the work with the illumination provided by opening of his cell phone every ten seconds.

At one point, there was shouting from the street outside.

"I forgot there were still bangers around here," Carlos said.

"Yeah. They tagged my car about a month ago."

"Oh? They don't like you?"

I shrugged and said nothing. I'm still unsure why they wrote on my car.

"Bangers are fucking stupid," he offered, walking back outside.

He never asked me for a bribe, although he indicated that he might have if the technicians still controlled the programming in the home. He said everything is controlled by satellites now, which is why he doesn't have more channels himself.

And although he turned down my offered soda, he did sheepishly ask me for a cigarette a couple of times.

Once he was gone, I flipped through the new channels and played with the On Demand thing. They seem to have a pretty decent selection of free movies I can watch whenever I like. I can pause them, fast-forward, the whole deal.

I watched the first 20 minutes of something and then switched it off. It felt good to switch it off. Getting cable shouldn't change your life.