Sunday, May 25, 2008

BLOG UPDATE

It's about 1pm on a Sunday and I find myself sitting in a coffee shop in Manhattan, trying to do the Internet thing because on Friday (the Friday of a holiday weekend, mind you), our building lost its cable/Internet feed. (I was planning on hitting Atlantic City for the day, but overslept). How did it go down? Well let me piece it together for you.

On Friday afternoon, there was a crew from Time Warner Cable doing some cable work in front of the bar. Apparently there's a hole/tunnel/bunker located directly in front of the bar that controls the cable for our side of the block. The restaurant next door was having problems with their cable, so the crew was there to look into their situation. At about 2:30pm, their situation was resolved and the cable crew packed up and left.

About 20 minutes later, I was on the computer at the bar, answering emails when all of a sudden, ZAP!!! I lost my signal. I found it odd as I usually get a pretty good wi-fi signal from the bar. So I went to my apartment to check on the router and sure enough, there was no signal. By the time I got back to the bar, there was no signal on the cable boxes in the bar as well. So of course, panic mode kicks in. No cable in a bar that's driven by sports? Luckily we still had a signal from our satellite boxes, so I switched everything over to the Direct TV feeds and we were able to get something back on the TV's.

In the meantime, I now have to deal with a major problem: How do we get someone out here to look into our situation? It's late Friday afternoon, on a holiday weekend no less. I call Time-Warner and explained the situation to the "customer-service" rep and she tells me that the best that they can do is send someone out to us on THURSDAY!!!! Almost a full week later!!! Of course, I'm vexed at this point. I explained to her that the cable is very important to our business and she of course, couldn't help me in the least.

I get to my apartment to see if I'd lost cable there too- and sure enough, no cable TV. Now it's become personal. Bad enough there's no cable for the bar; at least they had Direct TV to fall back on. But now what does a brotha do in his own situation? No cable, no Internet, holiday weekend when the only thing I have on my plate is work on Friday, Saturday and Monday? Are the gods purposely trying to make my life miserable????

So we get through Friday night with no problems. Direct TV more than worked well for the situation at hand. However, when I got out of work, I found myself antsy and wired up. I usually take about a half hour after work to unwind by checking emails, watching a bit of tv, etc. before settling in for some much needed sleep. However, I can't do that now because there's no TV/Internet to unwind with. So I tried to go straight to sleep. Yeah, right. Fat chance of that happening. It took me two hours to fall asleep. WTF?

Saturday afternoon found me at the bar much earlier than normal- simply because I couldn't bear to sit in a quiet apartment. So I went to the bar to catch up on some much-needed work; only to find myself being distracted by some of the usual suspects. So instead, I went to get a haircut. On my way back, I ran into some Time-Warner reps, who happened to be going into Jackson Hole for lunch. I spoke with one of the reps, (who turned out to be a supervisor) and explained the situation to him.

As it turns out, this guy happened to be the nicest person I met all day. He immediately made a couple of calls and next thing you know, he had a tech person dispatched to our bar to look into the situation. After some examining of our system (which is a clusterfuck of tangled cables and wires, by the way) and taking a trip up to the roof of our building, he made an interesting discovery:

Our cable wires had been cut.

Yes, cut. He asked if anyone had been on the roof doing any kind of construction lately, to which I said I didn't know. He ascertained that the wires were freshly cut, which explained why we weren't getting any signals. So he and a couple of other guys were able to temporarily fix the wires so that we were able to at least get our cable back up and running..... in the bar. As for the rest of the building, it was still out. At that point, however, I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At least we had something.

So now.... I have to waste Memorial Day waiting for a Time-Warner tech to swing by (after making a second call about my own cable/Internet, I was able to snag an appointment for Monday). So there's your update.


I hope your Memorial Day Weekend is going much better than mine.



Nuff Said