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All in all, we have been pretty pleased with our cable service. The price is a tad high, but we manage to justify it because (a) dialup was impossible to share; (b) it allowed us to drop a second phone line and (c) we got to drop our old ISP (about 10 bucks per month).
The installer who came out was nice, a smart Somali who had had a business of his own. The route he chose for the cable followed the power line from the pole, within inches of the neighbor's garage roofline. When I asked why not run the cable following the phone line, he explained that he could not have it T out from between the poles as the phone line did.
Several weeks ago, I got one of those annoying sales calls from the cable company. The woman on the line explained how they have a new promotion when I cut her off. She quickly interjected "You mean, you don't want to save ten dollars per month?" "Sure," I replied "I would love to save $10 per month." It turns out that it is cheaper to have cable internet access plus a minimal cable TV selection (basically the channels that we could receive via antenna) than to have cable internet without it. "Fine. Sign me up." She explained that someone would show up with a work order for me to sign and that is all it would take.
A technician arrived later that week with the work order. "I'm here to install the cable." I replied that we already had cable internet, and that we were simply signing up for a new billing scheme. He said that he would go out in the alley and take a look just to make sure. "OK" I said. He went out in the subzero wind chill up on the power pole in the dark. He rang the bell about half an hour later and started to enter the house explaining "All I need to do now is install the cable modem." He had a Motorola box under his arm. "We have a cable modem. We have had cable internet service for months" I explained. He began to enter again "Then, I just need to test the cable reception." "We don't care about the reception. We use cable only for the internet." I signed his work order and thought the matter closed.
I was away for the holiday when the cable company came by again. They insisted they had to move the cable further away from the power line and "needed to know where to drill." Roomie insisted that they come back once I returned. We scheduled a time for them to come back.
When today's technician told me that he was "here to fix the cable" I had to tell him that the cable was fine, but that he might want to check its proximity to the power line. He ended up moving the feed to the between the poles. No drilling required.
Posted by Underblog at February 1, 2005 1:56 PM