February 23 – “Installed”

Well, it wasn’t easy, but the creative AT&T technician finally figured out how to get us hooked up to their fiber optics system as well as to U-verse TV.  We played with the new remote last night.  The system is a lot more user-friendly than the Comcast system ever was.  At least for us.  And we can DVR up to four shows at once instead of just two.  It just seems like better technology all the way around.  The only difficulty we had was finding the channel that the Astros games will be on.  The tech and I were poring over the little handout he gave us of the stations available.  Chris calmly picked up her phone and googled it.  Had the answer in seconds.  100 mg/sec modem speed is a lot faster than 1.5 mg/sec.  That appears to have been a good move.

So what was the difficulty?  For him to get the wire run to where our TV is located, we had to completely empty out our climate-controlled storage unit.  Well, not completely.  The freezer and fridge and two storage cabinets stayed, but we had to move them away from the wall.  Chris said she had wanted to do Spring cleaning in there, but she hadn’t counted on doing it this weekend.  Once we stacked all the boxes and sewing materials and craft stuff all over the den, Chris immediately leapt into high gear, sweeping and mopping while the tech was working outside.  By the time he was ready to work inside, she had the place spotless and smelling clean as a whistle. 

Because of the different styles of technology, I suppose, we now have an extra box-looking thing on the wall near the TV, and the computer modem sits on the TV cabinet instead of on my desk.  The phones and fax machine still work as usual, but I have some extra room on my desk now.  Oh, and he told me the back-up battery that they installed for the old modem was no longer in use.  In fact he said they stopped using them a long time ago because they are kind of dangerous.  “But you paid for it, so it’s yours.  I’ll leave it and you can decide what to do with it.”  Well, alrighty, then.  Let’s get that baby unplugged right away. 

So today I get the honor of calling Comcast and canceling service with them.  I have to find out what they want me to do with their cable box as well.  It is a real dinosaur, so I know they won’t reuse it.  They probably don’t want it floating around for some pirates to make use of, though.  We’ll see. 

Psalms 139:17-18 says, “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!  How vast is the sum of them!  Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.”

Father, be with Edward the tech who did the install for us yesterday.  He worked really hard.  Amen.