Friday, July 27, 2007

You Get What You Pay For ...

I apologize for my lack of posting lately, but I’ve been dealing with some technical issues as of late (and I’ve been doing some extra reading – good for my melon). When I arrived back at my trailer after the leave, the first thing I did was to turn on the TV to check up on any news for the previous day that I had been traveling. Much to my chagrin, the cable was out (I think I mentioned that earlier). On top of that, my internet was running quite slow (to slow to post much). Well, I did what anyone would do, I deferred to the “experts” at Magic Island Technologies (my TV and Internet provider).

It took them a few days to get out here (the 24th to be exact), but I returned to my ‘hooch’ one afternoon to find a note on my TV that said, “Your AFN (Armed Forces Network) is now working!” Well this was excellent news, I turned on the TV and found a PERFECT picture! Needless to say I was excited (Notre Dame Football starts in 35 days and I need the TV to be functional). I actually didn’t watch too much TV that night, but did catch an episode of Emeril! the next morning. I left for work with the intention of calling my beloved sister on her birthday, and went about my day.

When I returned that evening, I turned on the TV and … Nothing … just static. Soooo, I had a picture for less than a day. The fact that ALL of the channels were out led me to believe that maybe it was a system-wide outage, so I went back to my book for the night. The next evening I fully expected the system to be back up again. When I arrived at the house … you guessed it … no TV. Oh but wait, now the internet was down too! Joy! So, in my zeal to get one fixed, I lost the other one. I took a deep breath and went back to the book (almost done at this point).

When I came home today, I decided to do some investigating. The internet had come back on it’s own (it has it’s bad days, so this wasn’t a shock), so that problem was fixed. I took a look at the back of my trailer and followed the cable lines to look for a break or cut. The lines aren’t buried or strung, they’re just kind of thrown on the ground between the trailers. On top of that, when a line goes bad, they don’t remove it, they just string a new one and tie them all together with zip ties. After 20 minutes of research, I found about ten lines on my side of the trailers that were ‘dead-ends’ (ones that had been abandoned from previous maintenance). When I came back to the rear of my trailer, I noticed that there were scraps of cable from maintenance lying by the box (hmmmm, a clue). I also noticed a fresh connection lying on the ground. It can’t be that simple … can it? Apparently, my intrepid team of cable maintainers ‘fixed’ the line by adding a new connector, and then just pushed it on the cable box … you know, the type that requires you to SCREW THE CONNECTOR ON! Well, I screwed the connector back on and went inside to find … my perfect picture back.

You would think that’s the end of it … nope. An hour later my neighbor stopped by to ask about the cable. It seems that he too had problems and received a note from the cable guys on the 24th saying it was all better. After he relayed the story to me, we went to the back of his trailer to find … the exact same thing. I will never complain about American repairmen again … unless they REALLY deserve it! Until tomorrow.
-Grease out.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Glad to know I qualify as 'beloved' in your book. Getting older's not so bad...at least I have cable continuously and don't have to root around in the backyard for the box. It's great that your extensive education kicked in & helped you deduce the problem. Hope it holds through football season -- at least for the Georgia games:)

~ Lisa

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