Since the beginning of the year I have been employed as a "home technician" aka cable guy for THE cable company in my area.  I took the job because I needed it, and last week I accepted an offer with a manufacturing company in a project manager role.  Tomorrow is my last day, I'm working a half day route and then turning in my van and equipment.  Allow me to regale you with some cable guy stories and answer any questions.

However many hoarder houses you think are in your neighborhood, multiply it by ten.  By my estimates I've probably been in 500 houses since I started and an alarmingly high number of them could be on Hoarders.  Or maybe it's that hoarders have more cable problems, I don't know.  But in those houses I refuse to move anything and just run lines and drill holes for cable wherever there is open space.  I'm not doing top tier work in a house where I'm dodging piles of cat shit and walking around mountains of garbage and dirty laundry.  

Internet trouble calls are the absolute worst.  People that don't know how to connect their own devices to their own wifi networks, and refuse to troubleshoot, call us in to "fix" their internet and typically act like self entitled assholes. Someone paying for the minimum tier high speed internet service (15 Mbps down), with 3 hardwired devices and 15 wireless devices connected to their 10 year old wifi router, will bitch at me about how much our service sucks because netflix buffers on a TV that's 2 floors and 5 walls removed from the wifi router.  And then be indignant when I explain why.  I have done installs where I have connected a customers iPhone and iPad to their wifi, working perfectly, and then think it was our problem when their windows ME running computer wouldn't access the internet.  

People think a cable outlet can be installed anywhere, on any wall, in 30 minutes for free, but they wouldn't DREAM of paying for an electrician to come and put a power outlet in the same place.  I am and was not an electrician, but the physical act of wall fishing cable inside a wall is the same whether it's coax or electrical wire.  My company formerly did not wall fish, but while I was there that changed and required us to do it.  I talked most customers out of it but a few still wanted it done.  And usually they couldn't understand why there was an extra charge for it.  

Another popular point of contention:  why is the cable guy late?  Well, for my company, it's because we have less technicians than can physically do the work scheduled.  I will typically have three 1 hour long jobs scheduled for a 2 hour time window, and inevitably someone is going to have me show up late due to basic laws of time and space.  So I'm usually fucked from the start, due to no fault of my own, but have to pre-emptively apologize for my company regardless.  

I have all kinds of stories about my time as Larry the cable guy, but that's just a short rant.  I'll answer pretty much anything - GO!

any "Dear Penthouse" stuff

Yeah, fuck that noise.

Yeah, that's really not fair to you. That sucks.

The last guy we had come to troubleshoot our internet connection speeds was great. Found water in the box, pulled a new line. Found water in the DOCSIS tap at the street, called a maintenance crew to replace it. We've had 90Mbps speed pretty consistently ever since. Great tech.

Unfortunately no, I typically worked in lower income areas and the womenz were never anything I wanted to bang.  Plus I had a girlfriend the whole time I was with the company.

Yeah, any boom-boom for free cable?


 

ETA Okay that was answered partly. How about did anyone ever try to get you to give them free cable?

"Free cable" is a thing of the past.  We're going digital, one of the last in the country to do so, and the channels you get on a cable box are controlled by the codes on your account, not anything I can physically change like in the old days.

Wat.

 

Your eyelids don't work?

I had people ask but once I explained how it wasn't really possible anymore they dropped it.  On another note I never turned down a tip despite company policies to the contrary.

Last cable guy in my house stole a watch.

Fuck TWC

Who tips the best?
Who tips the worst?

Oh they work, but I wasn't about to bang a 3 when I have a 9 at home.  

Doctors/nurses tipped the best, right up there with people in trailer parks.  No joke.  I never got anything over $20 but it was always either a doctor/nurse taking time out of their workday to be home for me or someone in a trailer park.  People in rich/fancy neighborhoods NEVER tipped me, they always had the mindset that I was there to serve them.

I have heard only bad things about time warner.  Had Comcast when I lived in NC.

Is it true that if my internet plan gives me 100MBPS download speed that my wifi will only put out appx 1/3 of that speed?

What's involved in getting the cable company to offer service a couple miles from where their service ends? I'm in the country and the cable internet service ends about 3 miles up the road. I'm stuck with shitty DSL.

I'd pay to have them run a line out to me. Ever hear of this happening?

I did u-verse installs for a year. i would rather starve than do another job that requires me to go to anyone's house again.

Hourly pay or by the job ?

In my house, my wife and recently dropped cable completely in favor of Hulu and Netflix. I have read that this is something that is becoming more and more common. I know you said it was mostly in low income areas that you worked, but do you think this is a growing trend? I think that cable is on the glide path to obsolescence thanks to streaming services and cheap high-speed internet.

Why is it that CATV guys never seem to miss hitting a Telco riser cable when they climb with their hooks? You guys know there's a whole set of rules where they can be placed, right? They don't go up the cable willy nilly. Concerned Telco splicers want to know...

A metric shit ton of money for one customer.

I would never think of tipping the cable guy, personally. Never crossed my mind and I'm not sure why someone would.

And you actually are there to serve them... although I get what you mean. But given how shitty cable companies are to be a customer of, you can hardly blame people.

tips for the cable guy?

Thats a new one for me

It all depends on your router.  If you have a brand new Docsis 3.0 cable modem, which will put out all 100 MBPS via ethernet, and you have it paired up to an old Docsis 2.0 Linksys router that can only handle up to 35 MBPS, give or take, then you are absolutely not getting what you're paying for. ALL your internet equipment needs to be rated for the speeds you are paying for/want it to process.  

Worked for Telco. Amen!

If your cable company will allow it, you could potentially run the line yourself.  I saw a guy do this for about 3/4 of a mile, our company gave him the mainline cable, and he trenched it himself.  Only charged him to have in hooked up at both ends.  Otherwise they would have charged him $5k.  3 miles is a little bit different story but I would ask if you could run the line yourself, assuming it's underground service.  

Hourly.  Started at $17.87/hr when I started on my own after training and got to just over $20/hr after a few months.

Oh shit, I didn't know it was customary to tip the cable folks. OOPS!

and I am serious...

I would agree that it is a trend, especially for apartment dwellers.  Lots of downgrades from full service to internet only as well.

We don't gaff at my company.  Only "climbed" poles with my 28 ft ladder.

I never expected tips, I was always pleasantly surprised when I got any.  But those are honest observations about when I did.  On the other end of the spectrum people expected me to wipe their ass for them and connect every single wireless device to their network (when I already gave them the network name/password) and set up their DVR recordings for them.  

By "serve" I mean the customers that want us to do things that are their responsibility, IE hook up their Fire TV stick, log them into netflix, connect every single wireless device, setup their wireless baby monitors, rewire electrical outlets, cut down another service company's lines, etc.

9 years in the field here.  I feel you on internet calls, most of them are sure repeat tc's.


Another funny thing is they bitch about a tech being late, but then want you to do 10 other things besides what you are there to do, especially older women.  I guess they think the other people before them didn't expect you to do more than the work order called for too.

Yup.  There's a house I've been to twice, and other techs 7+ times, for nothing.  They keep claiming low speeds but it's on a virus-ridden 10 year old computer and the speeds are there out of the modem when we test on a newer computer.

If I switch providers, what are the odds the next guy will pull all the previous guys lines for like $200?

I counted 9, freaking 9, cable lines to one plug in the living room. Place used to be a rental I guess.

Edit, it's like that room to room for each plug in 4 rooms. Drives me nuts.

It depends if the lines are all of the same type and could be re-used.  We use coax, and I'm not allowed to touch phone company twisted pair phone lines or satellite lines or anything like that.  Something like that really depends on the company and on the tech and how much time he has.  Something that most people don't understand is that from the pole to the house, is the service providers' responsibility.  Anything INSIDE the house, is OWNED by the homeowner, or apartment owner, etc.  Although a cable company will run lines inside a home, they are owned by the property owner, just like electrical wiring is.  If you identify which lines are currently being used, you can remove anything else yourself.

I'm an electrician and my neighbor had the same problem, I told him to just tear the shit off his house and let it hang. Some contractor or cable guy will be along to fix it. Seriously getting any cable company or telephone company around here to get their old shit down is impossible. We actually cut their shit down off our temporary poles all the time, those fuckers will put their shit on anything, and yes I have a serious hatred for those people.

 

I kinda hoard ammo.

Did you ever find "The Sweet Spot"?

This is the shit dropping from the ceiling, into a closet, then pushed through the back of the closet into the living room (or next bedroom, etc). From what I heard DirectTv runs new lines everytime they turn on service.

I'm gonna chop all that shit out one day, when it isn't triple digits out.

What was the pay?

It's not customary at all,  a guy could do the absolute required bare minimum, or throw in some extras that are just as easy.

No, someone will not be along to "fix" it, unless you pay for it.  What's on your house is YOURS, despite who ran it.  If you don't like it, cut it down, and have your current service provider come out and re-run lines.  If a home/property owner has gone back and forth from dish/direct tv/cable/dsl/time warner/cox/comcast/whoever else, they aren't going to re-wire your whole house every time they're there.

 
Routers don't follow the DOCSIS standard, that's for cable modems only.


And people, this is why you don't ask your cable guy for computer/wifi/networking advice.  Because few of them know what the fuck they're talking about.

Docsis rated or not, routers have speed ratings.

I thought he was talking about the service outside the house also,  when you cut that down around here they take about a week to get their wire off the ground.

 

True - call like that are extremely low priority, it's just the way it works.  A non-customer calling to have a line removed off their house isn't gonna go to the top of the list.  It sucks but that's the way it is.  And 50% of the time people call us to have lines removed that aren't ours and we aren't allowed to touch.

I know what you mean by horders...  I used to work in construction, building houses.  Sometimes we would get jobs doing windows in low income housing.  My favorite was playground equipment in the living room, like a sandbox...  I think one house had a dead animal under the kitchen sink...  I can't believe how some people choose to live.  Almost every house/apartment had a dildo laying somewhere.  Usually on a dresser out in the open.  And they knew we were coming to work that day.  We always gave them a heads up the day before.

In NC, the pay is anywhere between $10-$22 for a wiretech doing U-verse.

that would be correct. it ain't cheap paying for the material and manpower to run a distance that far. you're talking fiber and a node at a minimum if it's a hybrid system.

A-freaking-men, I don't know shit about IT. I'm just there to get the 768 Kbps DSL up and running. The customer can connect their 100 wifi devices later (and then bitch about the slow speed).