February 2009Good help is exceeding hard to find
Even in a down economy, it turns out. Let me set a quick stage for you:
My wife decided we were switching from Comcast cable service to the still-somewhat-new AT&T uVerse service. Her reasons, while I'm sure good and valid, are a mystery to me.
Nevertheless, after waiting two weeks for an install, she got a visit this past Tuesday morning from the AT&T guy, ready to do his thing. He said it should take no more than two hours. We were having three cable connections in the house replaced, with the attendant three new cable decoder boxes.
Several trips seem to have been required between our house and the nearest fiber drop in the neighborhood, half a mile away. Odd, but no matter, right? It then got progressively more weird - four, count 'em, four trips were made to the house by yet another AT&T installer, each time bringing a cable decoder box to replace one of the ones that Spanky, our installer, found not to be in good working order.
Five hours after he'd started his two hour job, Spanky left, happy with the job he'd done. TV was working at all three cable boxes, and the wireless access to the internet was also working. He'd personally verified it, using one of my wife's laptop computers. I'm certain he verified it, not just because wireless worked on our other laptops, but because when I checked Gmail, he'd left himself signed in on my wife's Thinkpad, to his personal Gmail account.
It goes without saying that IQ might not be one of the top ten attributes AT&T uses in choosing its installers. More on that in a minute.
In addition to flawless TV and wireless access to his personal Gmail account on my wife's computer, he also left the rest of my network (the wired part, in the office upstairs) completely horked. It appears not to have occurred to him that anyone still uses wired Ethernet connections. Dealing with all the wires he'd casually disconnected and dropped behind the desk, while reconnecting the several switches and the router in the office after I'd gotten home from work took a solid hour of my time.
But it was all made worth it when my wife told me "the rest of the story", this evening. How she'd forgotten to tell me yesterday, I don't know, but once I heard it, the delay didn't matter.
Spanky, who reportedly had AT&T support on his most worn-out cell-phone speed dial button, was upstairs near the end of our ordeal, trying to get a good picture on the device connected to the upstairs cable box. My wife walked upstairs in time to help him with his travails, however, shortening what might have been a 7 hour install (how does AT&T make any money at this?) into "only" 5 hours.
The picture he was getting was fuzzy, and it was cycling up and down the screen, for reasons he and Albert Einstein, his telephone correspondent, were unable to determine. Mrs. Patton to the rescue - she pointed out to him that he should be connecting to the 25" TV 5 feet away from him, instead of attempting to get a good signal on my daughter's fucking 7" screen karaoke machine.
[wik] True story.
[alsø wik] Seriously.
[alsø alsø wik] I shit you not.
[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] On further review by the replay official, my lovely wife, they only needed to replace three of the devices, not four. And karaoke machine has only a 4" screen, not 7", which casts Spanky's ineptitude in a whole 'nother light. The author regrets any inconvenience caused by these inaccuracies.
[see the løveli lakes...] Speaking of inconvenience, this morning (2/7/2009), the service went tits-up, and they're rushing one of their MENSA candidates out to resolve the matter. Tomorrow fucking night, between 4:00PM and 9:00PM.
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