Christopher A. Wheeler

So stop me if you heard this one…

OK, kidding. Some of you may know that we recently switched to Mediacom and their VIP package. I don’t really like Mediacom but our neighbor works for them and hooked us up with a sweet deal: Video (with Showtime, Encore, and Starz added), Internet (their cable is way faster than Qwest DSL), and Phone. The sweet part of the deal is that we’re paying about $60 less per month than we were through Qwest. Sure, the DVR is a little buggy compared to DirecTV. And sure, we could save even more money by getting rid of all of it. But let’s be realistic here.

Anyways, we wanted to keep our landline number, so I had to go through some crazy stuff signing papers and calling some place to authorize Mediacom to take over phone. Whatev. We got the cable and internets hooked up 10 days ago, and today was our appointment for the phone. So the dude comes over this morning and he’s going along doing some stuff. Now, normally my neighbor guy does our installs, and he usually gets here right at 0800 so he can knock our job out and get on with his day. So I was expecting him to come today right away, get it done, and we’re all on our way. I kinda had that in mind when I made plans with my friend Sherri to take Esmer out for her birthday. (Happy birthday!)

So anyways, this other dude comes over at 1000 and he says he thinks it will take about 30-45 minutes. Cool, no problem, I’m going to get ready while he’s doing that. So I take a shower and get ready, and I’m all ready to go, and Sherri is on her way over, and we’re planning on driving over to Esmer’s place and heading to Muscatine for a little Peking. Except… the dude isn’t done. Seems there is a problem with hooking the stupid phone up. So I wait, and I wait, and it’s not working. So I tell the dude… I’m supposed to be leaving, can we finish this later? Luckily my Mediacom neighbor happens to stop by, see what’s going on, and we agree for him to come back later and finish the job.

FF 3 hours, knock on the door. Its the dude, he’s here to hook up the phone. I let him in. He looks around. He can’t figure out why it’s not working right. So he explains to me the problem. Apparently the most logical way to do is to have all the phone lines hooked up in a loop so they are all interconnected, and run one wire outside to the magical phone box. This apparently cuts down on the connections outside or something like that. Except for, our apartment isn’t wired like that. And he doesn’t know exactly how it is wired. This is turning out to be a complicated case. So I tell the dude, hey, you should call all of your Mediacom buddies and get together and do this together, kinda like a teaching case at the hospital. I was kinda kidding, except for he said he just got off the phone with them.

So about 15 minutes later, the reinforcements arrive. Here are their three vans, all lined up nice and neat. I thought it was funny looking so I took a picture. Anyways, they figured out that two of our jacks are in “the loop” and the other two jacks each have their own line outside. It was funny to see four Mediacom dudes scurrying around the place, hooking up new lines and whatnot.

Anyways, that’s my awesome story for the day. Oh yeah, I got the Mongolian Beef at Peking. It was fabulous, as always.