What does a cable guy do?

I've been asked a few times what my job actually is. My official job title is Universal Home Technician- Proficient and I have my BPS (Broadband Premise Specialist) certification from SCTE (Society of Telecommunication Engineers) with video and data endoresements, voice to follow in the next few months. In plain English it means I have achieved Proficient status (one step below expert) in installing and troubleshooting video, voice and data in a customer's home and can help CBS (Cox Business Services) with business video installation and troubleshooting. My BPS means I can go to another cable system and say, "Yes, I know how to do this and here's the proof". In simpler terms, if you have Cox service and I walk into your house I can install it or fix it. I work from the tap (in our system, a grey piece at the pole that takes our main feeder signal and downsteps it to what can be used in the house) right to the customer's TV, phone or computer. Anything from the tap up I refer to our plant maintenance department after troubleshooting everything up to and including replacing the tap plate itself.

So what does this involve on a workday? First thing I do is sign on to my work computer and see what I have lined up for the day, normally a mix of trouble calls, installs, occasional special requests and "all day" work. All days are exactly that- I get to them when I can based on my work for the day. These are usually disconnects (either customer requested or nonpays), quick connects, seasonal upgrades (especially in my area on the beach) and LOCs- Loss of Comms, when our phone equipment goes down. Those can really be impressive when you get to the customer's house and are there to fix something they don't even know is broken yet, got to love the customer service boost there!!!

Installs can cover a HUGE range of what's involved, from full prime (brand new house, never had cable before) 3 product to one product, say upgrading to digital or adding home networking. They can take anywhere from a few minutes to my entire 10 hour shift, and you never know what you're going to run into. The full primes are the best- we get them set up and installed once and unless a box dies or something like that generally we don't hear from the customer for any problems. When you're installing the 17th person in a crack house and just trying to get in and out without getting shot at or dancing around needles and pipes...those are a different story. Those jobs are VERY much in the minority in my area- only a couple bad streets that we will refuse to go to after a certain hour in the winter based purely on safety, plus we've made it clear a couple times that if you mess with our people we will cut your wiring and make you wait a week or three to get service restored. Word gets around fast when you do that, and we never have problems with that more than once at the same address- try having 5 screaming kids that you can't turn on the TV babysitter for a week because you annoyed the cable guy, you'll never do it again.

Trouble calls- that's where the fun begins. For the most part we go in knowing there's a problem but not much else unless the customer service rep who set up the trouble call put in quality notes. This happens very infrequently, and we can tell by the calls we get rolled on when a new batch has come out of training- lot of wasted trips, but after we let our supervisor know and he lets THEIR boss know things smooth out pretty fast. A trouble call can be literally anything you can think of and range from pressing a button and being done to spending 4+ hours correcting things- this just happened to me in Watch Hill not two weeks ago and we still need to go back and do several hours' more work to get everything working correctly. Amazing how people with huge houses that are only there a few months will just let things go then complain when it has to be fixed...oh well, what can you do???

Special requests run the gamut too of everything from simple customer education to major rewiring. Usually you can get a feel for what you're going to find there from the notes or from whoever set up the work order but at times you are going in blind and that can be unnerving.

Another big part of our job is customer education- teaching people how to use their toys and gadgets. Luckily our stuff is very user friendly and generally idiot proof, though there are exceptions to the rules here as everywhere else. My test is if I can teach my dad to use it (very intelligent but can't operate a toaster) then I can teach anyone to use it. One of the best tools I use is showing the kids how to use it (Yes teenagers can be useful at times) and have them show their parents. They know how far Mom and Dad can go before they start glazing over and can spoon-feed them what they can handle in small doses. The other side of the coin is the super-geek who has every spec memorized and can't wait to show off this knowledge. I get a perverse pleasure in running them into the ground and out-geeking them, especially once they try to be condescending to me. Good luck out-geeking someone with my electronics background and high personal geek level- the best was the guy who had his master's from MIT and by the time I left was almost crying like a 3-year-old after the technobeating he got. I didn't want to do it but he sure asked for it and Yes, I did enjoy it a LOT more than I should have!!! For the most part customer education is easy, the hardest part (especially for the newer techs) is not using all the fancy cable terms but using simple English. I like doing that, and seeing the "click" as someone gets what I say is extremely rewarding.

So what do I actually do on an installation? This depends on the job, so I'll describe a "typical" full prime 3 product. I get to the house, meet with the homeowner (or whoever's there), go over my work order and get that straightened out with what they think I'm there to do- that can be interesting, to say the least, if the salesperson who set it up wasn't paying attention. We then walk the house to see where everything's going to go and I give an overview of what I'll be doing and a guesstimate on time. I then run a line in from the street, either aerial, underground or a combination, ground the line, do the math for splitters and equipment, get my signal levels set, run whatever lines I need to in the house, get equipment in place, get everything turned on, test it all and teach the customer how to use it. This is oversimplified but a good basic outline of a normal installation.

There are, for me, a lot of things to love about this job. First, I'm dealing with customers one at a time in their environment rather than having the screaming masses from a weekend sale or, even worse, Black Friday. Second, 99% of the time when I leave everything's fixed, installed and up and running. The other 1% I've called maintenance, there's a fix in progress and I follow up to make sure something was getting done about it. Third, my schedule- Wednesday through Saturday 8:30-7, no holidays. Overtime if I want to during the summer and fall (generally I'll go in 8:30-12:30 on Tuesdays for a few extra bucks) and if there's a major storm Cox will call and ask (not TELL me, ASK me) if I want to come in for overtime to help out, which normally I do unless it's on a Sunday. That's the one day Viv and I get together and it takes a LOT for me to give that up. Cox pays for my clothes, truck, gas, tools, supplies and if I have an issue I send it up to my lead or supervisor to take care of it. If a customer gets nasty I give them one warning then I leave- amazing how a person's attitude changes when they realize that Yes, I actually will leave and No, no one else will be out for a few days. I've only had to start to leave a couple of times before the attitude change, and I know if I did leave my supervisor would back me up 100%- he likes that I have the customer service background to deal with nearly everything. On the flip side he knows if I call with an issue I can't (or more likely won't) handle that he's in for one heck of a headache!!! I have no union to deal with and Cox is privately owned, no concerns about Wall Street. I can always call for backup or assistance if I need it and know who's brain to pick when I hit a brick wall- doesn't happen often but it is nice having that available.

Hopefully this gives an idea of what my work life is like. It's fun, challenging, ever-changing and there's always something to learn. I love working outdoors, meeting people, seeing all these houses and landscaping (I've picked up more than a few ideas of things I want to do from them), traveling and not having someone looking over my shoulder every minute of my work day. As I say on a regular basis, I should have listened to Vivian and started doing this a lot sooner. My retail background gave me a lot of skills that I use every day and a greater appreciation for the company I work for and the job that I do than I would have had otherwise. So next time you see a cable guy working on the pole please- slow down, give a little extra room and let them get home safe to their family, which is my goal every day. As I tell customers, my wife would be VERY upset if I came home dead!!!