Do They Let These Guys Sleep?
Posted By Ardellis on May 17, 2006
We finally got fed up with Comcast and decided to switch to satellite TV. Andy set up the appointment for the install for Monday, which I happened to be taking off, and they said that the installer would be here between 1 and 5.
We all know that that meant that they would probably show up at 5:30, unless I was foolish enough to leave the house for ten minutes at any point during the afternoon, in which case that’s when they would pull up. Yes?
Well, yes and no. Silly us, we didn’t realize that our appointment would conflict with the Great New England Deluge of 2006. Very understandably, the installers got backed up. I imagine that hanging satellite dishes off of people’s houses is no small challenge in a blinding downpour. So, when I got a call from the company at a few minutes after 5, saying that they were running a little behind, I wasn’t really surprised. They said to expect them in about an hour.
Now, I had plans to take my mother out to dinner, but she wasn’t home yet from her knitting group (jeez, she’s only been retired 2 weeks and she already has a knitting group!), so I figured I could work with this.
6:15. No installer. 6:45 Mom came home, checked in with me, and we decided that I should wait just a bit longer, ’cause, you know, these appointments are a bitch to get. By 7:15, I was starving, and since I hadn’t heard from the satellite company I was ready to assume that we’d fallen off the end of their roster.
Mom and I had a nice, quiet dinner, interrupted only by a cellphone conversation with my husband about when we could get a reschedule on the install, who could take a day off when, etc.
Half an hour after I got home, just as I was deciding that maybe 9pm really wasn’t too early to go to bed, there was a knock on my door.
You guessed it: the installer. He was slogging through his job list right to the end, and I was the last one on it. He even managed to be friendly and cheerful about it.
My mother had a dish already from his company, so he could hook us up through that and save making another hole in the siding (and save them a dish, too, of course). It would also mean he’d be done sooner, so it sounded good to me. We chatted while he laid out the equipment for our 2 TVs, and I found out he hadn’t had a dinner break. Or a lunch break. So I offered him a frozen pizza.
Yeah, I’m a soft touch. It goes back to my days as a door-to-door GreenPeace canvasser, when the kindness of strangers was often my only hope of a bathroom break. You remember shit like that.
So, my new friend Victor got our satellite up and running, and I was a zombie at work yesterday because I didn’t get to bed until nearly midnight. But now I can watch Doctor Who on Friday night in the comfort of my own livingroom. So, you know, worth it.
Comments
Leave a Reply