The joy of cable installation

How smart must you be to install cable? I realize that there are certain skills required and I am certainly not putting down any cable installers as less than intelligent – except for the genius who installed my cable today. I think he rode the short bus here.

First, he didn’t know if I was entitled to a cable box or not. My first clue was that I didn’t have a cable box and, therefore, since the bill reflected that I was being charged for one, that one should be provided. Oh, said the slack-jawed installer. Guess I should get one outta the truck. Then HE asked ME if I knew how the high speed internet they installed last week was tagged on the box. Huh? Then he spent almost an hour trying to get the cable working after he said, oh, this should be easy. The actual physical cable is already there. All he has to do is turn it on.

Well, apparently Genius Boy didn’t understand the concept of putting the TV on channel 3 to get the cable to work. He couldn’t figure out how to get my TV on channel 3 so, therefore, there was something wrong with the TV. It took me two whole minutes to run through the menu and find the magic sequence to make channel 3 appear (btw, lost my remote some time ago). THEN he tries to convince me that the cable cannot be run through the VCR because there’s something wrong with the VCR. I mentioned that this same set up was working just peachy keen three days ago 20 feet away. Well, ya know, Genius Boy says, when you move stuff, something things happen.

An hour and a half later, after five phone calls to Adelphia on his behalf, including one to find out which color of receipt to leave with me, Genius Boy finally is gone and it took me less than five minutes to reconnect the cable to run through my “broken” VCR.

Meanwhile, Genius Boy is creeping me out in a major way. Imagine Bill or Ted, which ever was the less intelligent of the two, but weirdly creepy in that child molester/rapist kind of way, and that’s my Genius Boy cable buy. Ewwwwwwww.

He’s gone and I’m now way behind on unpacking because he gave me the complete wiggies and I didn’t want to be anywhere near him while he “worked” and didn’t really want to let him out of my sight either. So I basically spent the afternoon wandering around him to make sure he wasn’t taking panties out of my dresser or sacrificing Twyla to the cable gods.

But now he’s gone, cable is working, and maybe I can get something done now!