Cable2

You visit offices and houses and businesses and meet a wide variety of people every day. I’m sure everyone has their own special horror stories, but there are a few things, whether with customers or their own company, that most cabling technicians seem to agree to hate.

1. People who can’t make decisions. Nothing is more frustrating than talking over options with a customer, drawing up a plan, and sometimes even starting an install when they decide to change their minds and go with something cheaper, or with a different cable option. Another aggravator are the people who keep looking at you like you’re speaking martian after they asked for a detailed explanation. Seriously, just tell us what you want to happen, and we’ll give you a few options at different prices to make that happen. I don’t understand the stock market and you don’t need to understand an Ethernet tree.

2. The company making you look bad. Sometimes, it’s actually not your fault. When a company has ten technicians and only six trucks, then it makes it very difficult for technicians to arrive on time and complete work in set hours. When you are the one showing up late, or calling for the fourth time to apologize for your tardiness, it is you that the customer is angry with — you are the face of the company.

3. Terrible weather in conjunction with terrible manners. Working in below freezing weather in gusty winds is never fun, but its much worse when a client asks for an update every thirty minutes and talks to you through the cracked open door of her toasty warm house with a mug of steaming coffee in her hand. Oh, no thanks, I prefer icicles in my nostrils and frozen eyelids over a warm drink. On the opposite spectrum, would it kill them to offer a cold drink when you’ve been slaving away in the blistering heat for hours? It adds a special irritation when they drink margaritas and watch you work from the pool.

4. Unsanitary and unsafe conditions. Whether it be a faulty ladder or a disgusting crawl space, just a warning would have been nice. Oh, you forgot to tell me there was a sewer leak until after I crawled around in it? Awesome. Or how about when you move a piece of furniture to access equipment, and find mold and other indecorous things growing there? Working in a filthy environment is never fun, but it’s worse if it can actively affect your health. And the smell is not helping us work any faster. It’s actually making us want to pass out.

5. The assumption that we are there to fix every piece of technology. I am a cabling technician. I have not been called here, generally at a very inconvenient hour, to assemble your computer, put together your surround sound system, see what we can do about your iPad not turning on, or get rid of a virus on your laptop. In addition, if we have come to your house to give you internet, please have some common sense and have a computer for us to test it on. In the same vein, if you have ordered digital cable, make sure your TV actually functions so we can test it out.