Phoning it in

This morning, much to my surprise, Cable Guy #3 appeared at the door. He’s #3 because he’s the third one Comcast has sent out to get us up and running with their Digital Voice service. The first dude (and he was definitely a Dude) did the least possible work he could do and still leave us with a working phone, basic cable, and a single laptop that would connect to the Internet. Upon seeing that said laptop was a Mac, he said, "Well, I hope this works," as if a Macintosh computer represented the greatest mystery he’d ever encountered. Which I suppose could be true, since he clearly didn’t pay any attention in Comcast School.

Cable Guy #2 came out after we discovered that as part of their service Cable Guy #1 was supposed to hook up our telephony modem to our house phone lines so that we could plug a phone into any jack in the house, instead of having to plug a phone into the modem itself. The second guy recognized our Apple Airport Express as the wireless hub it is, and didn’t have any problem with believing in it. Cable Guy #2 fiddled around in the cable box and made it so we could move the modem downstairs by the TV, and then upon my request ran the phone cord across a doorway and into the only phone jack in the room. (I’m going to create a new phone jack on the correct side of the door.) What he didn’t do, though, is make sure that we could actually receive calls in this new configuration. Which we could not, in fact, do, thanks to Cable Guy #1′s shoddy wiring.

Thus Cable Guy #3, aka Joe. Yep, this guy was actually professional enough to provide his name, and was knowledgable enough to both work efficiently on our system and to know when he needed to call in for more information. How refreshing! He didn’t leave until he knew for sure that our phone worked the way it should, that our T.V. reception had improved, and that our Internet service was plugging along uninterrupted. And he gave me a survey to fill out with feedback the first two guys are in much more need to receive.

So what all this means is that if you’ve called us in the past week or so and it rang once and then the call dropped, it wasn’t you—it was Cable Dude #1.