I Was a Cable Guy. I Saw the Worst of America
huffingtonpost.com
huffingtonpost.com
To me,it wasn't the worst of america but just humans being humans. The angry customers,9/10 of them are not all that bad when you realize they're mad at either the problem or the crappy company you work for. Maybe my working in a different state has to do with it.
The cat piss,dog poop and nastiness was bad but not as bad as being chased by animals and having turn your back to a growling hungry dog the owner insists "oh,he doesn't bite"
The bad ones stand out but I've been in really nice mansions and houses too. Very respectful and kind people too. Most offered water on hot days,some even snacks.
Meh,people are people. It's not good to generalize. Most people are just sorry,life is rough on the 99%.
Finally, I’m getting close to finishing up. Through the door I hear their 4-year-old girl yell “grandma!!! I think I stepped in dog poo outside!!!”
Followed by: “oh honey you got it all over the carpet!”
Sure enough, as I’m leaving I notice an epic trail of tiny dog shit shoe prints spanning from one end of the house to the other. 10/10!
When I went to the restaurant for breakfast the following Saturday, the mom apologized and told me all about how many times they had to run the carpet cleaner through the house to get it cleaned up.
(Aka why I have slow DSL: because it was either that or sue Mediacom until they actually supplied the service I was paying for. Yeah, there's a grudge here.)
I'm not saying I'm casting a sympathetic eye toward conglomerate post-monopoly abominations like Verizon & AT&T. Far from it.
What I am saying is that as nerds, we really only want to think it looks like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPNK7bc2qvM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZOZV7ugBas
But actually, it's more often closer to waiting tables for no tips, in homes consumed by pet smells, infested by perverts, losers and arm chair quarterbacks, pissed off that they've elected to pay for systems that can still suffer outages, just like any vaguely fault-tolerant network. Sometimes, as a subscriber of such systems, the faults hit you.
That's kind of what this article is drawing your eye toward. You wonder:
"How the fuck can a business seemingly employ
only monsters, operate policies concocted from
purest evil, offer zero options, get propped up
as a monopoly by the worst parts of government
funding and compliance, and still turn a profit
where so many other business would instantly
implode and vaporize?"
But, the other part is that in order to interface with the gears of a transmission, contact must transmit the forces of the drive train, and that part that makes contact with the customers is that customer service interface, and like the face of an interleaving set of gears, it must be a reflection of ourselves, on some level.
The customer service, in other words, is as abominable as the common customer.
Disclaimer: I've had friends that work in cable service call centers, who have suffered through high call volume outages, and the calls they would tell me about were ever bit as psychotic and soul crushing as some of the anecdotes from the author of this article.
In most US cities the power only goes out when lightning hits something or there's a freak heat wave and everyone turns their A/C on at once (or when there are genuine shortages, like in the old CA rolling brownouts). When the power does go out, the power company typically doesn't lie to you. The same was largely true of landline telephone services back in the day, and, in all honesty, is remarkably true of modern cellphone services (although there's a ton of crookedness about price, for the most part they seem to actually supply services they say they do).
In a way, it's actually egalitarian: for the most part cellphone companies, water utilities, etc., when they do abuse their customers, limit their abuses to money stuff and hence pretty much only abuse the poor. (This is less true about airlines but not completely untrue, witness first class and high frequent flier statuses). It's refreshingly fair that with cable companies in this country you can't get decent service at any price; hedge fund managers and janitors have basically the same terrible experience.
Maybe that's part of why there's so much anger at the cable companies, actually, because so many people who they mistreat aren't used to being mistreated by everyone else. And why so many of the customers are badly behaved.
The physical medium (the wire) must remain contiguous/unabraided and suffer minimal crosstalk interference.
This means the perfection of signal quality is being directly inspected by the customer, and that the product is non-portable, highly technical, and in personal, private spaces within the home.
Water and power are non-portable, but signal is purely graded by volume sufficiency being present or absent. So, to test, it’s either on or off, and once it’s on, job’s done. Very little haggle or complaint. Water quality is typically promised to be solved prior to the last mile, and last mile concerns are on the subscriber. Not quite so with digital service.
With cellular/wireless service, the last mile appliance is defacto portable. It’s a plain fact that handsets are pocket sized and semi-disposable/planned for obsolescance as a known quantity of the bargain, by now, at least.
With airlines, the variability of routing, origin/destination weather and ground realities combined with traveller fatigue, long haul concerns like sleeping in shared liminal zones means degrees of conflict are always on the table, so stewards, ushers, hosts and attendants expect static and noise, but require home-court advantage to operate.
Basically, cell providers can operate from beyond line of sight with wireless automation. True utilities like water and power can solve for quality centrally, and reduce field service to a binary volume of supply verification.
Meanwhile, airlines and and cable/phone companies must supply near perfect end-to-end coverage, and verify quality assurance in places where you sleep, confronting tired cranky people, where they relax, AS they relax (or try and fail to do so). That fact can’t be dispelled with a hand wave.
Cameras weren’t everywhere, film processing required time, nothing went viral in the same ways it does now. This also meant people were more sheltered, expectations were lower, and maybe if you were exposed to a word of mouth black market underworld you knew a little more than those who were naive. But otherwise, even without rose colored glasses, people probably really were more polite by default (unless drunk, for which there might be a time and a place, usually).
But cultural differences aside, the technical aspects of deployment for both cable and public telephone networks followed comparable implementation models.
Originally, the household telephone handsets were proprietary appliances owned by the utility, it was installed by a technician and did not belong to the head of the household. This goes back to telegraphs, undersea cables and wire services which tie into banking networks also.
Back in the 80’s, cable television was new. Black and white television sets weren’t a complete anachronism yet, and rabbit ears were a thing. VHS and VCR appliances were also new. Things weren’t digital yet. Satellite dishes were luxurious and conspicuous to neighbors, and it was said that you could watch channles from other countries with one, including picking up European and Asian adult channels that broadcast nudity, all without any added cost. It was just available to the high gain receivers that could pick up the signals and tune into them.
Cable followed a private model, not a utility, and catered to people with enough money, who were sick of interference static and snowy noise disrupting a TV show. It appeared as trunk lines were put in place in geographic areas, but the technical details followed the telephone utilities, in that the set top box was a proprietary appliance not to be modified or replaced by the end user.
But it was all pretty low tech. Running a wire, plugging into a generic contact point. No special technicians with authorization were require to peer behind the curtain and know the black magic. No microchips, encryption or DRM that couldn’t be trivially overruled. It was mostly the same TV on the airwaves, but piped to the home on a conduit more reliable than the ambient electromagnetic spectrum. Cable companies simply “scrambled” an unpaid channel (there weren’t many to begin with) with an analog modulation that wasn’t much more complicated than interference signals introduced by music equipment, and there was a black market for descramblers that bypassed subscription fees, called hotboxes. You could also just splice into a neighbors line and pull in service for free (stealing cable). I think there’s a Simpsons episode about it.
“We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”
Cable didn’t matter. Telephones didn’t matter. The internet didn’t exist. Things got done differently. Life followed a different pace.
People weren’t on psyche meds like they are now. Mental illness wasn’t diagnosed, or over-diagnosed for that matter. People drove drunk and chain smoked like it was nothing.
Things are different now. Outrage and misbehavior takes on different shapes, even if the signal to noise ratio is the same. We organize civilization according to different rules now.
I think we can agree that no amount of anti-competitive business practices justifies a customer exposing themselves in front of the company's support tech?
My first day on my own I went to a "hotel" run by an Indian that barely spoke English in the Tenderloin. He pounded on a door for ten minutes shouting something unintelligible and finally unlocked the door to reveal a tiny room with shit smeared on the walls and a naked transvestite covered in blood from a heroin needle writhing on blood-stained sheets.
"Shouldn't we help?" I asked. "No. Is OK. Fix TV." All the little metal fittings on the cables throughout the whole hotel had been cut off by guests for use as makeshift pipes. The hotel charged by the hour and didn't ask any questions.
I have many anecdotes if anyone is interested in hearing them.
Also, she didn't say anything as to whether the water offered was bottled or not.
I'm sympathetic to the author, she seems to be struggling. This seems true in her article to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/27/family-relig...) :
"How have you felt since coming out? Have you had a lot of therapy? Not so much and most of it wasn’t so helpful. I’ve had therapists cry and hug me and it was really strange. They just don’t really know what to do with it. I mean, I still hide things. I still have nightmares, I can’t deal with crowds. I will always feel kind of separate. For a long time, I just didn’t really have friends. In high school, I had no idea how to talk to people. I didn’t understand cultural references. Ninety per cent of conversations are: “Hey, do you remember that episode of Seinfeld?” and shit. And I was weird, I was just awkward. I read everything I could get my hands on. It’s just what I did, I hid in books."
I think she's a good writer, but her own comments suggest her perspectives might not match most people's.
I hope she keeps writing and finds more peace in things around her.
Or hope that things work out and his father finds ways to love him more. This author seems a little angry. The more I read, the more I wondered if this was a normal account, or the account of someone who always seems to find themselves in strife.
But I can't say no to a peek under the sheets of people's lives. It fascinates me. I don't think I could do her job but I've always wanted just an afternoon where time freezes and I can lightly snoop on how a random assortment of people live (though realistically impossible without hurting others). Being a cable technician seems like a fair, legal alternative.
In the words of Anthony Oliveira, "the queers who were nice/patient/gentle all got shot or bullied to death all that's left r me & the other pissed-off cockroach motherfuckers".
I just thought of a new conspiracy theory! The housing crisis is largely political and structural to zoning laws. A large part of the reason why forces to conspire to keep it going (because in practice its bad for everyone - rezoned higher density areas would sell for way more per unit of space to condo building developers than as single family dwellings, so both home owners and buyers are disadvantaged by it) is to abate the migration of youth into urban environments.
In perfect economics the cheapest place to live should be in the city - your per capita infrastructure costs are the lowest when density is the highest, and larger scale condo buildings are cheaper per tenant than single family housing by an order of magnitude. But because of draconian zoning law and NIMBYism cities are rapidly, way beyond the average, costing preposterous amounts of money to live in, and its a self perpetuating cycle - unmet demand for inward migration drives up prices and nothing is relieving that pressure.
So by keeping kids out of cities and stuck in their parents hometowns you can keep them isolated, bigoted, conservative. At least that seems to be what the hope is, and while some escape the ideology trap of small towns the majority of people who grow up there adhere strictly to their culture without deviation. So its probably working to slow the liberalization of the millennial generation.
Thats my tin foil hat moment for the year!
Sellers are disadvantaged by zoning. But it’s their neighbours who are the NIMBYs.
The world is unlikely to be how any one person likes it. Learning to live with it is a good skill.
She had this job for quite a while and so it seems like a very tiny assortment of unpleasant calls. Every friend I know who has worked facing the "general public" has similar grim stories.