I recently updated wiremunky and added in a category for Job Stories. [Link: wiremunky.com]

A CEPro post about the "service" providers entering into home automation got me thinking about the hundreds of run-ins over the years. Please post any stories you have about the guys who are going to put us all out of business. Do it quietly.. the comcast guy is napping..

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I have has to deal with comcast quite a bit over the last month. They have improved a lot! And I have been getting local call centers in Chicago as well.

Now if they would just impove the hidef image quality!

Had one run in with a cable tech a couple of years ago that almost ended up with the client suing us.

We were just finishing up a project when it was discovered that the DVR was DOA. Contacted the cable company and asked for a replacement. Due to scheduling, none of us could get out there to babysit the cable guy. Made the replacement of the box as clear and straightforward as possible. All cabling, including the power cord was labeled and hanging out of the front of the cabinet. I even put a "plug cable box in here" note on the shelf.

The morning after the cable guy had visited the job we had a message from the client at our office. It was a profanity laced tirade about how he was furious, was withholding final payment and he was consulting his attorney.

After much groveling on our part to "make it right" he allows us back into his house to take a look at what went horribly wrong. When I get there I find the huge cabinet pulled out of the niche that it was built for, almost every wire disconnected from the equipment, a cable wire run across the floor and last but not least, a cable box suspended from a component video cable plugged into an input of the 65in Runco plasma.

Long story short, the cable guy decided that instead of simply plugging the replacement cable box into the preinstalled cables and calling it a day, he took it upon himself to declare our system "totally wrong" that most of the gear was "some no name junk" (Runco, Integra, Escient, Triad) and that the cable guy and his brother in law would gladly come back after hours and "clean up the mess those AV idiots made".

Took me about 3 hours to rewire and clean up the disaster the cable guys made and quite a bit of salesmanship by our staff to talk the client down, assure him that what he purchased was indeed quality equipment and secure our final payment from him. There was supposed to be a second phase to this project, but it never materialized, in no small part due to his trust of us being shaken by some know nothing trying to make a few extra bucks on a side job.

Attempts to track down the tech responsible for this mess were unsuccessful, the cable company refused to divulge what tech was on site that day, so we pretty much had no recourse against them.

We had a similar run in with DirecTV. It was an older install with sat boxes at each of the clients 8 TV's. Fed by a 2x8. 1 receiver stopped working. Client called DirecTV and the installe came out and removed the 2x8. Connected a single LNB to the sat box in the room listed on his work ticket and handed the client a bill. We got a call to come out and look at the other 7 receivers that were not working now.

The service call turned into a $50k crestron system for us and later turned into a high 6 figure project when the client built a new house.

I have had entire new systems disconnected, luckily not any equipment racks, but still jobs where everything is right to go, including preprogrammed cable tv macros. The power, RG6 and composite video leads (their older boxes sucked!) have also been conspicuously placed and labelled with a note for the 'technician'.
One pulled the wires out of the wall I had fished, for no reason I can fathom and then hooked his leads straight to the set without going through the wall anyway.

Happy I live in a smaller area and there are a couple of guys they usually send when the client explains there is a large amount of automation in the home. They love my jobs because they can sit in one room, splice a couple of cables, use the same matrix switched TV to activate all boxes and get a full day pay for an hour or 2 work.

The most frustrating cable problems I find are the 'technical help' call centres who do nothing but read a script and dont actually have a technical clue how their boxes and systems work. And they can never get their head around how all of the boxes could possibly be in a cupboard nowhere near the tv screen and I cant see the picture from the rack.

I had a former Bell South tehnician who went to work for DirecTV come out one Sunday to add an HD DVR in my house (pre SWM days). I was so frustrated by his lack of installation prowress that I had to show him how to fish a wire from the attic in my house to my basement.

Another time the Comcast contractor came out while I was not home. He unplugged all my DirecTV receivers to make basic cable work in all my rooms (I didn't want it connected I just wanted it live into the house so I could do the runs later myself) and took all my Monster cables and put them into his truck. I came home and busted him and kicked him out of my house. I called Comcast and told them I was witholding $150.00 from my bill to reimburse me for the two hours it took to reconnect my sat boxes. The owner of the contracting company called me to argue about the $150.00 and after 2 minutes on the phone with me offered to mail me a check for the $150.00 (which he sent) after I let him know that I could have pressed charges for theft against his company for the actions of his installer.

I had an issue with low signal strength on my directv.  I told the technician that it happened right after a very windy day.  I suggested that he check the dish alignment.  Instead he told me that the cables I had pulled throughout my house were the cause of the problem.  

So I humored him and let him pull new cables (it wasn't costing me anything anyways)  

He pulled 4 new lines from basement to attic, (using my 2" wire chase) and guess what?  the system still said searching for signal...

I finally said screw it and went up to the roof myself, where I found a broken bolt on the sat dish mount.  I replaced the bolt myself and told the guy to gtfo.  

A couple years ago I had a customer that wanted to upgrade their dish and receivers to hd. The dish was mounted on the roof just above the eve, and the roof was only a single story. I mean eight feet was a stretch. The slightly rotund installer starts explaining that they aren't allowed on a ladder and starts trying to sell a pole to mount the dish on in the yard. When I asked why did he had a twenty foot extension ladder on his van, he said they would have too reschedule for a tier two tech to come out.

Scary.
I've been lucky so far I guess.


I once had a cable "tech" sue me and my client for walking backwards and falling on his ass. Lol.

O and the one time the cable guys foot fell through the mb ceiling.

I understand that their hardware changes just like ours does but no where as often. I see the same model cable box for years.

When i meet with a cable guy they have to test for the signal/strength and activate the hardware and done. They aren't able to do this. How on earth do they manage the typical install where they dont have a CI to babysit them?

And now these guys are getting into the home automation industry? @ best it will be the subsystem control equivalent of a bose surround system. This after multiple levels of tech support and 3-6 trips to your home that span a month and require a 4 hour window. What a joke.

What scares me is Verizon. Not comcast. Every Fios guy that came out for initial installation has been great. Smart, on the ball, and aware of the technology they were dealing with.

Verizon is the one gunning for home automation. Fios was the way in. They want to be all over your home.

I haven't seen them yet. I deal with comcast and at&t 99% of the time. I cut DirecTV and DISH out of the equation by hiring a professional satellite company to handle the installation.

I haven't met anyone form comcast or at&t that knows what they are doing. At this point i would be happy if they just learned to iron their uniform and take their shoes off at the front door.

Dead serious:

Directv guy comes out to customer's house when we couldn't be there. Wife is in her 60's and not technically savvy and doesn't notice a thing wrong after he leaves.

I show up and notice the white RG-6 cable running from the next room through the wall then stapled up and over the finely finished fireplace mantel sides and top then into the stereo cabinet. They said they needed the second cable for the DVR to work.

Of course he wouldn't have taken off the wall plate in the cabinet to find the conduit running to the attic in which he could have fished it. But I'm sure there would have been a "fishing the conduit charge".

Another installation had a Directv installer using his native dialect calling me "Loco" because I insisted he could fish the conduit easier than stapling it down the side of the house. He said that would constitute a "fishing the conduit charge". The hostility is overwhelming.

Machismo at its finest.

Ok, I’m going to guess it’s been about a year now since the craziest DirecTV Gone Stupid moment I’ve ever experienced.
I was on a job that started out crazy to begin with.
The house was prewired and included some A/V from another company who was there doing some finish work at the same time we were scheduled to install our equipment throughout. It was one of those awkward moments where we had to be professional but neither one of us were really feeling it.
The saving grace for that day was the DirecTV installation that was happening simultaneous with the cluster that was in full effect.
The installer showed up at 8:30 AM right on time and went right to hanging the dish. Everything seemed to be going fine but then again we were both busy and focused on the work at hand.
Time flew by and nobody thought to question what was taking so long until about 11:45 when I could have focused in installing the receivers rather than moving on to something else.
I asked the other installer if he had seen the DirecTV guy and he said no. The homeowner overheard me asking and said he just took off for lunch. I checked to see if he left the boxes and he did not so I took my annoyed feelings and moved on to other things.
At about 1:30 the other installer on the job made a comment questioning what the hell was taking the DirecTV guy so long out there. I stopped and sure enough there was drilling going on that I had blocked out for the first half of the day not worried about who was doing what.
The other installer (Kevin- Onetouch here on RC) said “I better go check it out.”
He went outside and returned about ten minutes later shaking his head. I asked him what was up and he said “well, Not the dish!”
I can only imagine the look on my face when I asked him what the guy has been doing all this time. He said “Dude, it’s not good. You should see the side of the house.”
I walked outside to check it out and this guy had drilled 15 holes in six locations attempting to hang the dish. He had made the holes huge hoping to find a stud to mount to. I told the DirecTV guy to stop and we would handle it.
I then returned to the house and brought the homeowner out to show him the mess that was made in his stucco.
The DirecTV guy said a supervisor was on his way and they would handle it.
The supervisor showed up and the dish was hung within 45 minutes. He gave the homeowner a number to call if he wanted to make a claim. The number of coarse informed him that he would need to talk to the guys supervisor. Needless to say it turned into a fight to get the repairs.
In the meantime I gave the DirecTV guy a couple areas where he could provision the boxes and them bring them to me for installation. That all turned out pretty well and by now we are approaching 6:00 PM and it was dark.
I had just finished installing the last box and started getting into testing the system when Kevin came out of the master bedroom and said “dude, you need to look at your touchscreen.” That comment scared the shit out of me since the DTV guy had just left after I politely told him that no we were not hiring.
I asked Kevin what was wrong with it numerous times and each time he answered you need to come look. My heart was about to drop until I rounded the corner and my touchscreen was flawless.
I was about to ask him what the hell he was talking about when my eye caught 15 beams of light shooting through the wall.
The crazy thing is this was a 2x8 insulated exterior wall that was left looking like star art.
This poor homeowner really took the ride.

I do however have to thank DirecTV for one thing.
Kevin and I have become really good friends since this and our better halves hang out regularly. Thank you DirecTV.

I have another one where a DirecTV installer walked through the kind of wet clay that makes your feet feel like 40 pound weights and walked into 22000 sf home with white carpet. This home belongs to a VERY high profile client that Stamp & Motech would love. The installer walked in the front door, took a left across the carpet and went down a flight of stairs and all the way down a long hallway to the media room. This was not a low pile or cheap carpet.

Look on clients face = Priceless.