I stayed late at work last night to finish up some stuff. We normally have a staff meeting on Friday afternoons at 3:00, then everyone starts leaving when the meeting is over. We didn't have a meeting yesterday afternoon, so I used that time to try to get some work done in the quiet, without the telephone interruptions. I usually don't work late when Bob is waiting at home for me, but he went down to the lake this weekend, so it seemed like a good opportunity. By the time I got home it was nearly 8:00. I was looking forward to making a sandwich and sitting down in front of the television for some mindless entertainment, but there was nothing but static on the television.
Frankly, at first I thought I'd hit a wrong button on the remote, I've done that before, so I checked the television upstairs and it was just static, too. And there was no internet connection. So I called the cable company and after some investigation, they said that everything looked fine until about 4:00 Friday afternoon, when we suddenly lost connection.
The guy on the phone asked me if we'd had any yard work done or anything like that, and I said I thought from the chemical smell that they'd fertilized today, but I didn't think they'd mowed the grass. In any event, something had happened, so he said someone would call me today, Saturday, to make an appointment to come out and fix it. He said it might be Monday before they could get out.
Today I was out having lunch at Chipotlé when my phone rang. It was the cable company saying that they could have someone out between 5:00 and 7:00, which was great, since that meant I wouldn't have to stay home from work on Monday. I ran some errands, and got home a little before 5:00. The doorbell rang at about 5:30, and when I answered the door, the guy on the porch said, "Cable Guy!"
He went out back and looked around, and called me to come look. There was a new wire running across the yard that I hadn't seen before; apparently our neighbors had had something done and the wire was running across (and apparently going to be buried in) our yard. After a little more investigation, the cable guy came back to tell me that it looked like another cable company had come in to install cable at our neighbors' house and had simply disconnected everyone else that had cable running through the box behind the houses and just left it that way. The way he described it, they just pulled out all the cable connections--three other households--and connected up theirs.
I said, well, I guess you'll be coming out to repair the others, too, and he said he supposed he would. After he was finished connecting everything back up, and I had checked to be sure the televisions and internet were working, he went back to the truck and got a disposable camera to document the evidence. He said that was so we wouldn't get a bill for the repairs. Hard to imagine that people do stuff like that, but I'm sure it happens all the time.
Since I couldn't watch any television shows, I watched one of my Netflix DVDs -- The Rocker. I liked it. It wasn't a great movie, but certainly enjoyable. The other Netflix DVD I had in the house was M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" about a family fleeing from a deadly virus. I only watched about ten minutes of it before jumping up and turning it off; I don't know, maybe it would have been okay, but the first part of it looked so gruesome that I didn't have any interest in waiting to find out.
I looked through my own DVDs to see if there was anything else I wanted to watch, but decided to take a book up to bed instead.
Today, not knowing if I was going to have television and internet or not, I went to the library and checked out a stack of DVDs:
- Feast of Love
- Martian Child
- P.S. I Love You
- The Girl in the Café
- Happy Accidents
- No Reservations
I have freelance web work I should be doing, but I think I'll go watch a movie and work tomorrow!
