Ode to a Cable Guy

The TV is unplugged now, the cables in a heap,
The satellite deactivated, the remote is asleep.
I have no entertainment, and you may wonder why;
It's because I'm sitting here, waiting for the cable guy.

We have a media center, a computer with light that glows,
The cable box will hook to this, in whatever port it goes;
More connections to the stereo, Xbox and DVD,
And when he's done he'll turn them on and then collect his fee.

He'll hook up both the televisions, and the Internet,
Because we use them frequently, most every chance we get.
I love to watch the television, through channels I will fly,
As soon as this man sets it up, this great ol' cable guy.

With cable Internet I will receive e-mail anybody sends;
On cable TV I'm sure there is a channel to watch Friends;
Oh the world I'll view, it opens to new horizons I will delve;
As soon as this guy will show up, sometime 'tween 8 and 12.

Sorry for the terrible poetry, but I couldn't help myself. God save me; I AM sitting here waiting for the Time Warner cable guy to show up (not Larry, unfortunately, although this is the South so he may be a look-alike). We've been using satellite television for several years now, but the quality of the picture is lacking (could just be our outdated TV, I suppose), and the reception is disrupted by the microwave in the kitchen and any thunderstorms that move through the area. These are things they really don't tell you about in their "It's great, all you need is a clear view of the southern sky" sales pitch. We're also taking the opportunity to dump our DSL Internet connection. Again, when we signed up for it, they neglected to tell us a few things. They were excited to tell us that we were indeed within their service area for DSL, but they didn't bother to tell us that we were pretty far away from their router. What that means is that we are far enough away that we lose signal strength and bandwidth along the line before it gets to our house. So our home router (we have a wireless network in the house) will lose enough of the signal that it will reset itself, and then we have to turn it off and back on to get our Internet connection back. Kind of a pain, so the cable Internet should alleviate that.

I'm sure the poor man is going to freak when he sees what he's dealing with. We've got two rooms that he'll need to switch over from satellite to cable. Won't be too strenuous because there are already cable connections run to those rooms; he'll just need to install the cable boxes. But in the main room he's going to have to contend with the wire convention from hell. Sitting behind our entertainment center (where he'll have to go to reconnect everything) is a tangled jumble of wires from the TV, satellite receiver, DVD player, stereo receiver, tape deck, CD player, 5-speaker surround sound system, media center computer (a full tower connected to everything), wireless router, two Xboxes (360 and regular), old Sega Dreamcast, video game boxes, and a load of mouse turds. Hey, I did TRY to vacuum them up. Anyway, unlike many tech geeks, my husband does not have that anal-retentive cable-bundling attitude. You know, many of those guys have to zip-tie their cables and wires together, and color code them so they are easily identified as to which machine they belong. Not at our house. And the poor guy will also have to run a new cable connection in the dining room for the Internet connection, since that's where our big momma computer that runs the whole house is (it makes us sound a little like the Gates family, saying we have a computer that runs everything. Not so. I'm sure our whole house could fit into Bill's bathroom, for goodness sake, and one easy way to tell we aren't Bill and Melinda: I have an iBook).

So I'm sitting here, killing time waiting for this cable dude to show up. Why do they give you such vague time references, anyway? Sometime between 8 and 12. how many people do they schedule during these time periods? Two? Three? How long does the average installation take? If it's two hours, why can't they schedule one person at 8 and one at 10? We'll certainly understand if they are a few minutes tardy because they encountered difficulties. But giving a four-hour window isn't very convenient. I mean, I was frantically cleaning the rooms in the house this man was going to have to work in, because I can't give this guy whom I will probably never see again the impression that I really am a total slob (which I am). So I had the whole place swept and vacuumed and the laundry piled out of sight (note I didn't say "put away") by 8. And no cable guy. Since then I've just been killing time, not wanting to do anything too crazy in case he showed up.

Oh. Sounds like he's here! And it's only 10:40! I feel like I've won the lottery or something!