Cable Capers

There wasn’t a Monday Quiz this week, but I was still planning on posting a blog entry. The only problem is I couldn’t post a blog entry. My Monday plan was to watch the episode of Degrassi I missed on Friday, post a big and then watch the St. Louis Cardinals’ home opener with hopes that they’d see the same results my Reds did on Opening Day. That is they are the Reds’ arch rivals and they were playing the Reds. Guess what? While the Reds were losing the game, they were tied 4 all going into the 9th inning. The Reds score NINE runs! They beat the Cards on their home opener; SWEET! Unfortunately, I only know that because I read it. I didn’t see the game. :(

I was about half way through the half hour episode of Degrassi when I got the spinning wheel and buffering message. I checked my network connection. It said “limited.” That means that if we had networked our computers together, which at this point we haven’t, I’d see other computers in the house, but no Internet. I tried a few things, rebooting computers, rebooting the computer, rebooting the modem; still no Internet. By then it was game time, so I figured I’d watch the game and see if it was a cable company problem that would be fixed by the time the game was over.

I turned on the TV, black screen with a message that my channel would be available “shortly,” sorry for the inconvenience. Trouble was EVERY channel would be available “shortly!” Okay. Degrassi and blogging not working is one thing, but taking my baseball away is completely unacceptable. I called the cable company to find out what was up.

We’d had a minor rain shower. I didn’t think that could be the problem, but all of our service was out; how did it happen? I did some trouble shooting with a tech and we determined that there was a box problem because if I was getting the message on my screen the box and TV were communicating but the box wasn’t translating the signal. The tech, who is also a baseball fan, suggested that I could unhook the box and plug the line straight into the TV and still get my regular channels that way as the FOX Sports channels are not single premium channels. I guess I talked a good enough game while we were trouble shooting that he knew I’d be okay to swap the wires around on my own. Seems it still holds some weight with the techs if you know the connector to your box is an “RF connector.”

After making the switch I was on a call with another tech. I had snow. It’s not that the box wasn’t translating a signal, plugging directly into the TV there was no signal at all! The box didn’t have anything TO translate! The new tech did some other tests and discovered there was no signal going into our house at all! I scheduled a Tuesday service call. There would be no rest of Degrassi, no blog and NO BASEBALL!!!

David stopped home before his evening meeting; I’d been keeping him updated through text. He knew what the problem was; there was a cable end flying in the breeze on the pole where our connection comes in. He spoke with the techs this time and let them know they’d need a bucket truck to reconnect our service because it seems it’s been windy enough to have knocked out the wire. He also wanted to make sure we were credited for the day of lost service we’d have endured by the repair time on Tuesday.

They must have had an “Oh S&#@” moment, because our service visit got bumped up to “In the next hour.” After the tech reconnected us, he told me what had happened. They had a disconnect order and disconnected the wrong house! When they reconnected us nothing was disconnected; they got the completely wrong pole!

GPS think we live on the other side of the street that comes off our street. I knew a day would come that there’d be a problem with that. The correct pole must be on the other side of that street. –grumble, grumble—