Let me ask you guys this, but please don't get all upset or anything.

But what did you guys do when you had to have the TWC, Concast, Verizon, AT&T or whomever come out to your house?

At some point it had to happen, like when you moved or got new service because you jumped ship from another.


Then what about those clients who actually went by your policy and informed you that one of the providers is coming out on such and such time? First, do you charge for that? Or do you eat the cost because you are just damn happy that the client called you? (Honestly with what is being said here, I personally would've eaten the cost as the client actually obeyed the policy.)

KOT

For new construction or remodels, I coordinate my equipment installation with the cable/sat install date. I am typically on site the whole day installing TVs and programming remotes. I make sure they don't leave until everything is working, internet, on demand ... etc.

If I find out the homeowner changed service or equipment, I schedule a follow up appt. and charge hourly to make the system right again. They are fine with paying the invoice.

Yes, I try to be there to supervise the installation. I have to be there anyway for reprogramming so I try to meet the installers at the same time.

They have two options.

1. Pickup or have the equipment sent to them for us to install. This is obviously for upgrades and not service changes.

2. Pay hourly rate for us to sit there. It is not our issue that cable companies give a 4 hour window. It was also not our decision to swap services.

I will tell you that the time to sit there and wait is typically cheaper then the charge to fix a system that a cable guy royally screws up. As has been said, many will rip every wire out, often will cut wires short that were already left terminated for them, will break off ends to things such as emitters...

Treat your clients like adults. When the system is done be sure to warn them about calling you before calling the cable or phone or satellite company. If your client forgets this important detail... and they place a call that leads to your rack getting jacked up... sounds like a billable service call to me.

this doesn't work either. i had a keystone plate with all coax terminated and the directv guy removed the keystones, then cut off my compression fittings because they were not the ones he carries, and barrel connected them to the ports. looked like @ss.

Two very good points I hadn't thought about when I posted earlier.

When you do get the chance to supervise the cable companies. Do you, for the most part, get the understandable folks? Or do you get the "technicians" who is a know it all?

I know I am comparing apples to oranges here, but as a formal slot tech. I have been called to baby sit (have the key to open the game and gaming commission requirements) the vendors to work on their own games. These vendors have been working on a particular brand of slot machines. Well frankly the one's whom they work for. For the most part, they knew what they were doing. But there were a few who did not. Now I understand if they are new. But the 2 who sticks out in my mind, worked for their company for 5 plus years and still were complete morons when working on the very same machines for the last 5 plus years. So I kinda get where you ya'll come from... no, I DO get where you are coming from.

KOT

The last time I had a cable guy to my house, he swore that the splitter outside was the reason my internet wasn't working, because I had put it on and it wasn't one of theirs.

Guy must have felt like a moron when after testing my internet on his laptop and not getting anything, he calls a fellow installer who tells him that a node was down even after his dispatch said there were no outages.


Bunch of F@cking Morons.....they are not allowed back in my house...EVER!!!!!

Lol same thing happened to me...I had a keystone behind the TV w/ a 3ghz connector....I'm standing behind the guy as he takes off my wall plate & says these don't meet spec. I laughed in his face & told him to prove it. My customer who I've worked with before started laughing...the guy then started rambling on about blah blah blah.

It's funny when the customer laughs at him with you and makes him feel stupid. I felt kind of bad for him though & apologized for making fun of him but explained to him how much the customer pays me an hour to put on those "non spec" connectors. He understood but says he had to change them anyways and apologized.

Funny, I actually enjoyed helping the dude that installed new wiring in my house. It was nice to be off the clock.

This installer was very experienced and we shared some good industry laughs.

I don't terminate to coax ends in the panel due to them cutting them off. Also they don't replace the ends of it's terminated into a plate.

If it's a matter of just swapping cable boxes in a rack that has been laced neatly and you don't want them to eff it up, do it yourself but charge for it. I do that all the time and nobody has had a problem with doing it that way because they know the cable installers don't want to deal with a rack like this anymore than we want them to mess it up. Overall, it costs the customer less and doesn't annoy me.

Make it clear to the clients that you will charge for any damage to the cabling because your warranty is for the work YOU do, not for fixing what someone else screwed up.

I have to ask all of those complaining about fittings being changed. Do you know what ingress is? Do you carry a $2k Dsam to check for ingress? Ingress causes major issues for your customers tv and internet service. Then add up the cumulative noise getting into the system from everyone in the area. Do you carry a Sleuth to check for leakage? It is illegal for the cable companies to have leakage. Some connectors out there do suck. Splitters go bad causing rf levels to be low or reverse levels to be higher than modems, emtas, and cable boxes can overcome and talk back to the CMTS. We all might be good at what we do, but we are not required to be at 8 to 10 jobs a day, penalized for being late. Most are not network pros and are not trained to be. They verify internet/wifi or services work out of the box customer signed up for. Anything more in depth is what CI do. Charge for it and move on. I agree some do some dumb things. But do not be mad at a guy that plugs the yellow cable you used for digital out into the video out! He probably pulled everything out and just matched up colors again.

Maybe out of 1000X this is what happened. The other 999X the story goes something like this...

Client has 12 TV's with a directv receiver at each TV. 1 TV is not working. Client calls direcTV.

Directv shows up, cuts the RG6 coming from the dish and the RG6 going out to that one TV and they barrel them together. DirecTV then replaces the box in the 1 room that was not working.

Now the 1 room is working. DirecTV guy fills out his paper work and leaves. I get a call about 11 TV's not working after the DirecTV guy left.

A customer of ours called us because he was upgrading from Verizon DSL to Comcast broadband. Wanted us to help with the transition. The first day my tech sat there for 4 hours and the tech did not show up though he called several times to say he was on his way.

A few days later I waited with another tech for another 4 hours and no one still had come. We had run the coax from the outside of the house, down through the basement and snaked the wire up next to a access panel for a water cutoff inside a bookshelf. Told the customer we weren't sure where the tech would want to put the wallplate so we left the wire run out of the cabinet without a wallplate.

The customer calls back the next day and says the tech finally showed up but asks us if we can come back again to install the wallplate because tech who showed up did not have a drill. Amazing how someone can show up the run a cable and not have a drill.