Ok, before everyone starts throwing bricks...i'm the cable guy!
How many of you folks have had a positive dealing with the cable company? I just had another (in a long line) of depressing work days because the company has everybodys work orders messed up.
I work for Charter Cable in MI and boy oh boy i wonder how they find new customers. The organization seems so flawed at every level. They folks who take your order in the far east usualy make a minor/large mistake and it goes downhill from there. They set you up with a time block for install and your good to go...or so you think!
Enter the cable guy....
My day starts at 6am where i head to the office and get my equipment destined for your homes according to the work orders. Lately a typical day is 4 am jobs (8am-12pm) and 4 pm jobs (1pm -5pm), each usualy taking between 1-2 hours. If we apply some math we find that at the average amount of work for the morning runs from 4-8 hours and the same for evening. Thats 8-16 hours of work for a maximum for 8 scheduled hours.
Once in a blue moon everything goes right but more likely its as follows...
Jane Doe orders cable and internet with "A,B,C" pieces of equipment. I show up an hour late (its a good day as i'm not 2 hours late) with "AFZ" equipment because that indian screwed up the work order. Now my bud has to travel from across town while i try and find something to work on to stay productive. Cable guy #2 shows up and his equipment is bad because the cable company recycles equipment like my buddy does girlfriends....way too often. On the long hard road to functioning reliable installed cable equipment we discover the COD quoted the customer is wrong. Its always $90 instead of $70, $100 instead of $40, $352.67 instead of $30, or my personal favorite: "whats a COD?". Now come on i'm 29 and I know what a COD is. Sometimes they try to pay me in pop cans or straight change. And sometimes i get a niftly little show called "The 7 people who live here trying to scrape up $25 between them".
Finally we're nearing completion and i'm ready to explain how stuff work when out of the blue comes: "What about that other cable outlet in the kitchen we asked for?" Are you talking about the one it would have been nice to know you wanted before i did all the work, cleaned up and put the tools away....that one? Depending on the polite nature of the customer i may run the outlet....or not. Finally, again, its time for customer education. If the technology itself isn't enough to confuse the customer the 25 different types of cable boxes, modems, remote controls, and individual instruction booklets for each sure as hell will. Then its back in the truck and off to the next one, and so on until the route is complete at 6-7pm.
This can be a dangerous job....i'm no pansy or anything but... I've been chewed on by dogs, smashed my fingers in the service boxes at the street often(no keys...have to pry them open), knocked off ladders, whipped by cable caught on the road by passing cars doing 50 by my cones, crawled through turds and whiz, and others factoids to numerous to list.
I get that cable installed though, yes sir feel more reliable than the post office these days. "Whatever it takes" is the offical company motto...no joke.
So between job searching i spend most evenings thumping through the 'hood on my bullet to unwind. Very effective in my case!