TV

Tiring of rabbit ears, Mohu Leafs, preamplifiers, Magic Fractal things and still not being able to get the FOX station, we broke down and re attached the TV umbilical cord.

I called on Thursday to sign up for Atlantic Broadband’s Limited Service which gives us all the local channels and their sub-channels, a couple of shopping channels, a couple religious channels, etc and the weather channel for about a third the cost of our old service. They were also running a special deal with the limited, for a year I could get it and their super-duper high speed internet for about $15 more than we are paying now for their mid-tier internet.

We set up an appointment for Saturday. It conflicted with a MMC event, but it was better not to have to take off from work, so… Because it was a weekend we were told that someone would be at our house between 8AM and 4PM. Because we are literally a stone’s throw from the local office we got lucky and a little after eight they called and said they were on their way.

We thought great, we might get to go bowling and have lunch with the group after all. We should be an easy job because the infrastructure was all in place, all we needed was a splitter in the box on the outside of the house and the trap removed on the pole across the street.

When the Tech, Brian, showed up with his trainee, Brent, they thought it was going to be easy too. They had a wireless router and a cat5 cable in their hands. When I told them I didn’t need that, I needed the limited service added and the bump in internet speed. Brian, who probably played pulling guard on his high school football team 10 years ago and has gone to fat, rudely demanded to see the PDA from Brent, who was probably the AV guy in high school twenty years ago. Brian looked at his paperwork and saw that it said what I said; he started swearing half under his breath at the girls in the office and their level of stupidity. Brent, who was standing behind him, rolled his eyes at me and later apologized. The two of them kind of bickered about what to do about the fact that the modem was mine, but their paperwork said I had an old one. When they finally agreed on who was going to do what and they finished up, we had TV, but the internet wasn’t working. The modem failed to reconnect properly. It would run through the front panel light sequence until almost the end, and then start over again.

Brian called for tech support and Brent took this opportunity to go sit in the truck and get away from the bad vibes. After about 15-20 minutes they got a internet connection, but the guy on the other end of the line said that he was reading a kind of big loss in signal, Brian said that he would change out the line from the pole to the house. The ladder come off the truck and The Lockhorns go about re-running a new piece of coax from across the street to the house.

When they come back in, the internet comes up, but at my old speed, 8Mbps up and 3 Mbps down. Brian explains that while he was up on the ladder a moving truck came flying down the street, ran over the cable they were pulling down, drug it down the street and in the process broke the port it was hooked to. They called in a maintenance guy to fix it, so when he does that; the speed should go way up. They are going to go on to their next call. Total time on scene was 2 hours 15 minutes. Bowling is out, but if we wait awhile and drive over we can still get a seafood lunch with the MMC.

I was inside setting up the TV channels and Donna was playing on the internet. The longer she surfed the slower it got. When it got below dial-up speed she called me in. The modem lights were acting accordingly, but now we lost all connection. I rebooted the modem and it went back to the whole “getting so far and starting over again thing” and never hooking up. I called the support line and after 5 minutes on hold, got a tech on the line. He tried a few things on his end, I rebooted the computer, and we unhooked the cable and power from the modem, waited a minute and hooked it back up. Still no dice. About that time, the maintenance guy showed up with his bucket truck. It took all of two minutes for him to do his thing and off he went.

The help desk guy stayed on the line with me the whole time and once the maintenance guy left, we tried one more time to disconnect the modem and restart it. When that failed he said there must be something wrong with whatever the first two guys did this morning. The only thing he could do for me now was to put in a call for them to come back. When I asked for an ETA he couldn’t give me one. Seafood in Augusta was now off the table, so Donna stayed home and I went to Moe’s for takeout.

Without our usual episode of Frazier from Netflix to watch at lunch we popped in a DVD to watch a movie. After the movie was over I went in to check something on the computer and the modem lights indicated we had an internet connection. Sure enough, we were online. I ran a speed test and we are now rocking a 40Mbps download and 3 up! Somehow it fixed itself. I hooked it back up through the router and everything is back running.

Big Brian showed back up about 3:30 and I told him we had magically got going. He got his meter out of the truck and checked the signal strength, he ran a speed test, shrugged his shoulders and left.

That was fun.