Cable Guy No. 1 agreed to meet at 10 a.m. at the Melrose Restaurant in Lakeview–a show of resolve in an occupation where punctuality is defined not in minutes but two-hour windows.
10:20 a.m.: No cable guy. He answers his cellular phone and says he’s at I-55 and Ashland Avenue and will be another 40 minutes.
11:40 a.m.: Still no cable guy. On this call he says he’s at Sheffield and Diversey, just a few minutes away.
11:55 a.m.: Steve Day, a TCI Chicago Cable TV installer, arrives looking for Cable Guy No. 1, who also happens to be his supervisor. When informed that the supervisor was expected almost two hours ago, Day explains, “You get hung up sometimes. He’s usually on time.”
He pulls out his own cellular phone to call Cable Guy No. 1.
“He said he’s stuck in a meeting somewhere,” Day reports. “He said he won’t be available until 1 o’clock.”
Yes, we’ve entered the cable TV zone. It’s not a place where wacko cable installers stalk hapless customers, forcing them to joust at Medieval Times and wreaking havoc on their personal lives, as Jim Carrey does in his new farce, “The Cable Guy.”
Rather, it’s a world in which cable guys shuttle from one building to another disconnecting illegal hookups, plugging in new customers and enduring the barbs of irate customers and, occasionally, police officers. (It may be worth noting, however, that one cable guy later in the day would say of Medieval Times: “It’s a neat place.”)
Mr. Day, having wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time, you are hearby anointed Cable Guy No. 2, our real-life tour guide through this world.
Day, a 39-year-old Bridgeport resident with a bushy mustache and easygoing demeanor, works for Diversified Cable, the St. Louis-based company that TCI contracts to do its installations and audits. He and his fellow cable guys (cable women are a rarity) have been blanketing the Lakeview area lately to update buildings’ master cable boxes.
The cable companies that operate locally have been on a campaign to improve their reception, not just on TV screens but in the homes of customers. They want cable service to be associated with something other than endless waits–in telephone purgatory or at home at inconvenient hours as that time-frame window opens wider and wider.
Cable spokespeople insist that service has improved significantly over the past few years, and they’re particularly keen to get that message out now that a movie is portraying the industry’s ambassador to the public as a psycho. But many subscribers don’t need a flick to fuel their bad attitude.
Another unhappy customer
Even standing at the corner of Melrose and Broadway, Day is not immune. A DePaul University law student, spotting Day’s identification badge and his companion’s open notebook, seizes the opportunity to vent about the company temporarily disconnecting his building’s cable earlier this month.
“We had to wait 3 1/2 hours for the cable to come up,” the student, Donald Roth, complains. “When I asked what this is for, they said this is to improve service. But someone else said they were just trying to root out illegal cable.
“It’s just mismanaged. They don’t take the time to tell the customers (what they’re doing).”
Day listens patiently, and after Roth departs, says matter-of-factly, “That’s not true. We post (informative flyers in) the buildings three days before we go in.” The problem, he adds, is that so many people are mad at the cable company that they remove the postings out of spite.
The movie has it backwards, you see: It’s the cable guys who bear the brunt of the hostility, Day says. Once, when he arrived to fix someone’s cable that had gone out right before a New York Rangers hockey game, he says the customer “started screaming like crazy and asking me what I’d done. He started throwing magazines at me.”
Then there was the school teacher who wouldn’t let Day’s truck out of the parking lot until he ran over to Walgreens to buy fresh batteries for her remote control, or the guy who kept snapping Polaroid pictures of him and threatened to have him arrested for turning off the cable for five minutes to switch the wiring.
Day says he thinks the installers’ tardiness rap–probably No. 1 on the “Why We Hate Cable Service” chart–is overstated. “I think about 98 percent of the time I’m on time,” he says. As for why arrival times are so hard to pin down, he adds, “Every install is just a little bit different. They’re not always as simple as you think they’re going to be when you get there.”
All around town
Day, who arrived at the Melrose Restaurant after a couple of morning installations, is headed to wire up a single-family home on Fletcher Street. He hops into his cluttered, red pickup and begins a circuitous route that takes him north on Broadway, west on Addison, south on Sheffield and west on Wellington.
“Fletcher’s right around in here somewhere,” he says, turning north onto Seminary and scanning the street signs. “The only really annoying thing with this job is when someone calls for an install, and you show up on time, and they’re not there. Barry? Where the hell is Fletcher?”
He heads east on Belmont and north on Clark before hitting the elusive Fletcher. For the record, he arrives at 12:15, comfortably within the noon-2 p.m. window that the homeowner, Monica Fischer, says she was told to expect him.
Fischer takes him along the exposed-insulation side of the mid-rehab building to the back, where loose cables dangle from a tree. Day takes a look. “This is a two-man job,” he says. “I’ll be back here at 2 o’clock.”
Fischer says OK.
Next stop is a courtyard building on the 700 block of West Sheridan that Day has been auditing. The “box” consists of two boards jutting out from a cellar wall with plugs attached to the top and bottom. The plugs have tan tags to represent subscribers, red tags to signify non-subscribers or lime-green tags to denote disconnected illegals.
Plug by plug, Day matches the serial numbers to those listed in a notebook to ensure that the right apartments are hooked up. When he finds one that is wrongfully connected, he unhooks it and sticks a green tag on it.
“This box isn’t too bad,” he says. “There are only a couple of illegals in here so far.”
Tamper, tamper
People generally get illegal cable by soliciting someone to tamper with the box (as Matthew Broderick’s character does in “Cable Guy,” triggering Carrey’s unwanted attention), unless they do the work themselves.
Thus cable guys may rank second only to traffic cops as bribe magnets. “Maybe two to three times a week someone will ask,” he says. “One guy came over to the box and offered me $80 to hook him up. I said no. So he offered me $100. I said no. So he offered me $180, and I said no, and he got insulted.”
Eventually, Day adds, the guy simply decided to sign up like a normal, legal person. “The salesman was more than happy to take his order.”
You wouldn’t expect cable guys to admit that they do accept bribes. Still, Day says they really don’t. “None of the guys I work with do. They’re making $40,000 to $50,000 a year. It’s not worth it,” says Day, who is saving up to open his own bakery.
Besides, he says he likes his job, although he began work at 8:30 a.m. and doesn’t expect to finish until midnight. He has been a cable installer for three years; he previously operated a mail-order paint-supply business and worked in the Dominicks Finer Foods warehouse.
To become a cable guy, Day says he learned everything he needed to know in a week at work. “It’s basically a pretty easy job,” he says.
On the plus side, most customers actually are friendly, he says, and some are especially so–like the woman who brought him tea while he worked outside on a cold day or the elderly woman who offered him dinner and showed him old photographs as he hooked her up.
“I’m still waiting for my first naked lady,” he admits, though some colleagues have their own tales to tell. (Stay tuned.)
Not a perfect job
On the minus side are the unpleasant people and situations. “I went into this woman’s condo, and she said, `You’ll have to pardon the smell,’ ” he recalls. “I walked in and it just reeked. It smelled of water damage or something, but when she opened the sliding doors to her kitchen, it was filled with garbage. She said it was two months since she threw the garbage out–she was too busy. It made me nauseous.”
But the biggest drawback, he says, is the amount of time spent with no people around–a dynamic that appears to have helped launch Carrey’s character off the deep end. “The job gets lonely when you’re working by yourself going through the boxes,” he says, though in this particular cellar he is kept company by a parade of beetles and cockroaches that seem to be vying for the Most Oversized Insect award.
Day interrupts his audit to head over to the unofficial Lakeview Cable Guy headquarters, the Gaslight Corner restaurant/bar on Halsted Street, to round up help for the Fletcher Street job. Eight colleagues are inside grabbing lunch and new assignments from their supervisor–yes, Cable Guy No. 1.
“Today’s been one of those days,” the supervisor says, glancing up sheepishly from a table of paperwork.
A night to remember
The installers, most of them in their mid-to-late 30s, chit-chat and trade war stories. Clarence Todd tells of the previous night’s disastrous late-night hookup on the 600 block of Roscoe Street: He was climbing a ladder to reach a cable box on the building’s exterior when he apparently rattled the window of a woman living inside.
“She freaked–a black man going up to a window at night,” Todd says. “In a matter of minutes, I was completely surrounded by about nine police officers. They refused to take my explanation why I was there.”
Eventually he convinced them that he was legit and avoided arrest, though he says he has been banned from the building. “The customer I was doing this for, he felt so bad he gave me a $25 bottle of wine,” Todd says. “The policewoman said if it would have been her bedroom window, she would have shot me.”
Julio Quijano, another Diversified installer, says a man once accidentally directed him to an apartment on the second instead of the third floor. When he walked through the open door, he startled a naked woman reclining on her couch.
“She stood and started yelling, so I left right away,” Quijano says.
Cable guy Matt Roth says the building he is auditing, on the 3600 block of Pine Grove, was 80 percent wired illegally. One guy even reconnected his floor with his own cable wiring while Roth was in the building.
“I came back behind him, I disconnected it again and waited,” Roth says. “He was about to touch the box again, and I said, `Hey, man, what are you doing?’ ” The guy beat a hasty retreat.
Day snares two installers to help him hook up the house on Fletcher, just blocks away, and at 1:55 p.m. they take off. It would be just another on-time service call for those chronically reliable cable guys.
