Betta Getta Bucket

Here’s what I learned today: If you do your cable yourself, and you do a shitty job, the cable guys will just show up and fix it for you!

Seriously, this happened, I swear to god:

I came home from work this afternoon and there was a Comcast van outside my house, which I ignored because I hadn’t called the cable guy and they don’t usually just show up to give you presents or anything like that. But, it turned out he was eying me when I got out of my car, and he asked me did I live here and I said I did and could I help him? And he said:

“There’s a cable leak coming from your house.”

And I thought: A cable leak? But I just finished mopping up the electricity that leaked all over last week! Well, at least that explains the dripping noise under the floorboards…

What are you talking about?

So I let him in, because that’s what you do when you’re a woman alone and somebody shows up with a story that makes absolutely no sense at all. Well, hey. I was flabbergasted, gobsmacked, bumruffled – though I think I might have made that last one up – plus he did step out of that official-looking van and everything. Anyway, I’d like to think even an escaped, psychopathic convicted father-raper would be able to come up with a better line than "You've got Anna Nicole dripping all over your hardwood floor."

He explained – I made him explain three times while I stood there slack-jawed and drooling – that the cable signal actually leaks out of any loose connections. It’s not dangerous or anything (Johnny and I joked about putting a bucket under it to save for power outages) but it interferes with radar signals. Badly enough, in fact, that the way they detect leaks in the first place is to send over a passing jet (or maybe he didn’t say jet, maybe he just said airplane, but whatever), and the jet picks up the signal, and the jet says “The leak’s coming from Townville!” And then they send a truck to Townville to drive around and sniff it out and the truck says “the leak’s coming from this street!” And then they send the guy in the van to come to the house and fix it.

Except? Nobody calls you first. The guy from the van he said he’d been here the other day but nobody was home and so he checked the outside connection – or replaced, I think he said, the outside connection – but that didn’t fix the leak (he had this sort of walkie-talkie-looking thing that made a screaming noise when it picked up the signal, sort of like those wandy-thingies at the airport) and so he’d come back today to try again to get inside.

Now, wouldn’t you think he might have, I don't know, called first and said “Is anybody gonna be home, can I come over?” I would have said “[Insert your own waiting-for-the-cable-guy joke here]” So ha ha on the cable company, how do you like them apples? Nobody’s home when you come and you have to come back twice, ha ha!

Anway, he checked the tv in the living room and he didn’t find anything there. He jiggled it where I’d attached the DVD player (and he actually disconnected the antenna from the cable box which we didn’t discover until he’d been gone for hours and we turned it on and thought all the cable had leaked out), but nothing was loose. And so then I offered to let him look at the other tv in my bedroom – which I didn’t mean to sound as suggestive as that comes across (but I can't help it, because I’m just so goddamn sexy) – and he said no, could he look in the basement?

Sure, escaped psychopathic convicted father-raper, let me show you to my dank, dark basement!

I took him down and showed him where the splitter was – which thankfully I didn’t brag about having done myself, because the first thing he did was pull the wire out that I’d put in and laugh and say “you couldn’t have been getting very good reception on that television!” I rolled my eyes and said “A couple channels didn’t come in that well but the rest were fine,” which was even true, thank you very much – except for I didn’t bother to mention that the couple channels I couldn’t get were NBC, ABC and CBS. But that doesn’t matter, cuz who watches those old dinosaur networks, anyway?

So. He went out to his truck, and he got his tools, and he got a, a little connector thing, whatever you call it, and he went down in the basement, and he fixed it! And now I get the networks on the second television! It only took a year, two televisions, a flyover, and a visit from my friendly neighborhood Comcast surveillance team!

Or else, I don’t know. Could be bullshit. Maybe some valuable I didn’t even know I owned is missing. Or maybe, Johnny says, he planted bugs so Scooter Libby can keep an eye on us while we’re watching TV.

Whatever, at least now I can watch Scrubs – and House, and 30 Rock, and How I Met Your Mother and (forgive me) Supernanny – in my bedroom.