Last week I gave you a run down of what things were like the first couple of months I worked at Servcom.

Though I knew it wasn't I wanted to be doing the rest of my life, the gig wasn't that bad and the days moved pretty quickly for the most part. As I had mentioned, it was nice having a pretty fixed schedule with weekends off. Sure there were some nights that a cable install took longer than normal and I had to be out late finishing up my part, but those weren't too common.

That all changed when the cable company (Charter) decided to start doing weekend installs. Suddenly the status quo was changed and the weekends I had been enjoying off were quickly filled with installs.

I was still fairly new in the grand scheme of things so a lot of the weekend shifts fell to me. It wasn't too bad because they tended to not do as many installs on the weekend as they did during the week, but it still kept me on an awkward schedule vs. my friends and family.

Not long after they started weekend installs, they also opened up cable modem service in several other markets. This meant that instead of covering two cities we now had to cover five cities. To meet the demand, Servcom hired a large number of new workers.

With the number of cable modem installers now close to 10 and me not being the low man on the totem pole anymore, I soon had the responsibility of running the weekend crews. I would divy out the work orders and determine who was going to go where. I tried to make sure it was fair and I even continued to take routes myself but despite all of that, there were still complaints I wasn't being fair.

Thankfully, the management knew what I was dealing with and they were pretty dismissive of the complaints. It was nice knowing they trusted me and had faith in my ability to be fair.

Before long, things would change yet again with this part of the business. I am going to save that for next time though and instead share with you a couple stories I can recall from my time installing cable modems.

Installing cable modems took me to all manner of dwelling in pretty much every neighborhood you can imagine. I installed them in mansions and in mobile homes. I can still remember some of them when I see them. In fact my wife and I were driving down the road just the other day when I pointed to a house and said "I installed their cable modem". She just laughed at me...

It wasn't very uncommon to show up to a house at 10 in the morning for my second install of the day and be offered a beer by the person I was doing the install for. "Ugh, no thanks, I have to drive to five more installs after this."

I had one house where the guy had made his own home made wine and wanted to give me a bottle of it. Even if I was more of a wine drinker, I think I still would have passed...

Where I live, some people have what is called a "Michigan Basement". This basically means that their house does have a full basement, but it never had poured concrete, so the floor is just dirt. I showed up to a house with one of these once and started to head downstairs to check in with the cable guy to see how much longer he thought it would be.

I passed him coming up the stairs and he quickly told me to turn around and head back up. Apparently the homeowner or renter had a large number of pets and they allowed the animals to use the basement floor as their giant litter box. The smell he told me was horrendous!

I once pulled in to a trailer park in a city south of the area we originally covered. I drove around the park trying to find the right address and eventually slowly pulled up to the correct unit. I wasn't quite sure what to do when I found the entire trailer surrounded by police tape indicating it was an active crime scene. Talk about being a little unnerved!

Cable modem installs didn't just happen in the Summer, we did our share of driving in the Winter too. There were many occasions I found myself driving down unplowed roads in my little '94 Chevy Cavalier 4 door trying to get to an install. I felt more like a mail man than a cable modem installer. "Neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night will keep me from installing your cable modem!"

Remember how I mentioned that all of this took place before GPS was as popular as it is now and Smart Phones were probably just a glimmer in Steve Jobs eye. I can't tell you the number of times I drove in circles trying to find a house because they didn't have their street address clearly visible.

If you get one piece of advice from this series, let it be that: Make sure your house number is clearly marked. Those green signs that people have on their mailbox poles are awesome if you live in the country. If I had been driving an ambulance instead of installing your cable modem there could have been countless loss of life due to poorly marked houses!

We really had a pretty good team, and things were moving along quite well for all of us. As I said, things were about to change again and I will cover that in my next post.

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