LinuxMusicians

Hi fellow LM's

I hope you all are doing OK in these truly weird times and being good citizens and staying healthy.. If you've been unfortunate enough to get Covid-19 (I have a daughter who had a presumed but almost certain moderate case and has recovered) then sincere best wishes for a speedy recovery!

Here is a little story during my Covid-19 days I thought I'd pass along for no particular reason... hopefully it's at the very least mildly amusing. Names have been changed to protect the innocent..

I changed my Internet Service Provider the week that Covid hit and now I'm having constant disconnections... I live in a rural area where we basically get a choice of 2 companies selling the same point to point wireless technology which is essentially as flaky, unreliable and random as getting TV through rabbit ears.

Anyway.. so "Belle Kanata" sends out a young guy to install my new Internet service on a Saturday afternoon at about 4pm.. He looks around and says the wireless antenna should go on the west side of the house, I say "OK fine but the Modem/Router needs to stay where it is currently because of 4 CAT5e wired lines that come out of the wall" and he replies "Oh I can't do that because we don't fish wires.." I say "OK, I understand you can't make promises about fishing wires just any old place but in this case there is an empty drywall bulkhead going across the basement that is accessible and I will even help you fish the wire". He says "no go! I'll put the antenna on the east side of the house facing west and come in where your old internet did.." (I'm thinking..."but wait, aren't you a 'professional' installer"!? Isn't straightforward fishing of wires an ability you should have that is greater than the customer??!"). But what I say is.. "as long as you are receiving adequate signal at the antenna that's fine with me" and to jump ahead a bit in the story and he proceeds to install the wireless antenna on the wrong side of the house nowhere near as high as it should be but tells me he's "getting good signal". He does one speed test (which I won't lie was pretty impressive for rural internet) and promptly hits the road.. 43 seconds later I'm surfing around and the modem/router starts disconnecting every 5 minutes or so... Now I get to thinking while buddy was doing his antenna install and he seemed to have been putting a lot of screws into the antenna base and then taking them out again but eventually he came down the ladder and says "we're good to go"... So the next day being Sunday it's moderately windy, I live up on a small hill so I get lots of wind exposure and I get on the 'ole net and man it is disconnect city! I recall the rather dubious antenna install from the day before and pop outside to see the wireless antenna rocking back and forth in the wind... hmm that doesn't look good at all. Being a DIY farm boy and never backing away from a good mechanical brain teaser I grab my extension ladder and scamper up to have a look at the mounting flange of the antenna and with equal parts amazement, disbelief and disgust I see 3 out of 6 mounting screws have missed the wood on the house fascia completely and the 3 that did go in are not spaced in the proper outer holes of the mounting flange for any degree of strength... this thing looks like a lollipop stuck in oatmeal porridge and any more wind it's going to be lying several hundred feet from the house. So I have a dilemma, this young man was obviously devoid of any sort of innate mechanical common sense... Covid has now hit officially... My new internet is broken and 2 kids just came home from University and are finishing their semesters online so I guess I better call Belle Kanata...or perhaps NOT! So I do the obvious farmer thing and spend all afternoon Sunday building a proper base and remounting the antenna so it's now strong enough to pry the house from it's foundations but does that fix the connection problem..? Well no of course not!

So I relent and contact Belle Kanata and to paraphrase they say "hey man we can't be fixing your internet, everybody is working from home and the cell towers and networks are overloaded don't you know we're in a pandemic crisis!!?? Just suck it up and wait your turn...Jeez!!" So I say "well yeah... but this thing has been disconnecting from the moment it was installed and your dude did a terrible job installing the antenna so I understand not sending someone out but can you at least tell me if I'm getting a good signal?" So they tell me "oh yeah man (*muffled talking to person in next call center cubicle)... you're getting a really bad signal!" (To mansplain: bad signal is independent of the amount of downstream users, so the real issue is the antenna is in the wrong place) They reiterate the Belle party line "everyone is home using the internet for work...blah blah blah but we'll see what we can do..." So a week goes by and I'm getting pretty frustrated and my girlfriend is over for the first time in 2 weeks from both of us being in quarantine and I get the ladder back out and run up even higher to the top of the antenna and alternate between twisting it, turning it and holding on to it for dear life with absolutely no idea of where the signal is coming from while she runs speed tests and yells the results out the window to me (she's a keeper! ) and by some miracle of dumb luck it starts working just well enough to get us through the next little while... I'm not sure what the moral to this story is but to my topic question...

As a person who may be reasonably 'handy' or 'DIY' do you constantly run into situations where a paid "professional" comes to your home or work to do something and they don't even seem to have the most elemental understanding of what they're doing?? Do you find the phenomenon of people "half-assing" their jobs moving from occasional annoyance to occurring most of the time?? I find this to be a disturbing trend and it makes me fear for my retirement years... lolnotlol

ADDENDUM: I should clarify that Covid-19 is the backdrop of this situation but it has no direct correlation to the principle of what I'm talking about. Of course I understand that there are factors that are affecting the availability of internet for some people and that people in service industries most certainly shouldn't be dispatched and putting themselves and others at unnecessary risk at the current time for minor complaints.. To be honest I don't think the pandemic would change the quality of workmanship or customer service in this case at all.

That's it, discuss and stay healthy!

Aww, that story had such a great setup, I was waiting for the punchline and then it just fizzled out. I hope something awesome happens later this week and the you write an epic rock ballad about it and record it with your band so that we can hear how it ends.

Hi Michael,

I guess too much real life in there to be terribly funny, I was hoping some of the imagery might be funny but the persistence of "half-assing' it throughout all walks of society is difficult to elevate to belly laugh proportions..

> As a person who may be reasonably 'handy' or 'DIY' do you constantly run into situations where a paid "professional" comes to your home or work to do something and they don't even seem to have the most elemental understanding of what they're doing??

Yess! I am not overwhelmingly skilled, but it happens to me every few weeks. Not exactly the same, but also a case of "Man, you actually are doing this for a living, no?": Last week I explained USB Audio Standard Compliance and the difference between large and small diaphragm microphones to a guy working in supposedly one of the best music stores in the country (not the US).

Yep. I see this all the time, to the extent that these days I do as much as I possibly can myself - even if it requires learning completely new skills and buying tools I'll only ever use once

Last year I restored and old fireplace in my lounge that a couple of building firms couldn't be done without the entire chimney breast collapsing - presumably they'd never heard of wedged props.

Don't know about the Kanata region (joke) but if the 'installer' job description includes the proper mounting of the antenna in all situations then yes, he should be able to do it. Which means that the employer must verify the required skills regarding that aspect of the work.

Maybe the installer guy is waiting to get up the corporate ladder instead ?

Got the exterior walls of the house painted on Monday. Guys told me that the gov't will impose the refusal of any new contract although ones that were already signed can be executed, or so it seems. I'm certainly not glued to TV or radio nor the gov't web site, nor clicking the youtube gov't inserts, so later on Monday I thought of dropping by a paint store to ask about oil primers for a deck ... to find that I had to make hand signs through a closed door so that the guy inside can come up and barely opening the door, told me that only phone and email are accepted. This is getting ridiculous.

So the paint guys will be soon out of job, as with many others. How will the housing market look like this summer is a good question.

jonetsu wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 1:20 pm
Maybe the installer guy is waiting to get up the corporate ladder instead ?

Hi jonetsu!

ahhh I see what you did with the 'ladder' analogy..

I would think/hope showing some facility on the aluminum ladder might be a better way to fulfill climbing the corporate one..

As to your paint issue, It's pretty miraculous your guys showed up at all on Monday, but I agree we have no idea what the widespread employment and economic repercussions of this are going to be, most likely as difficult to heal as the virus itself..

folderol wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 12:30 pm Yep. I see this all the time, to the extent that these days I do as much as I possibly can myself - even if it requires learning completely new skills and buying tools I'll only ever use once

Last year I restored and old fireplace in my lounge that a couple of building firms couldn't be done without the entire chimney breast collapsing - presumably they'd never heard of wedged props.

Hi Will,

I can't say I'm surprised to see you pop up here, I would have guessed you're a man with many skills.

Sadly often the 'possibility' of a job falls hand in hand with the ambition of the contractor to do it..

Michael Willis wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 3:19 am I was waiting for the punchline and then it just fizzled out.

Three free screws!

Seriously, I laughed my install off.

I worked construction right after high school for about a year, and it really opened my eyes. There is a lot of shoddy work done everywhere, as not everyone has a drive for perfection. Some guys that I worked with were terrible -- doing MacGyver hack jobs and calling it good. Others were more methodical and cared more about doing the job right. This construction job was one of many I had when I was young that convinced me to stay in school.

I think that is a balance that we all struggle with to one degree or another. Those of us on the perfectionist end of the spectrum have a hard time with efficiency. Those of us on the hack-job end of the spectrum have a hard time with competency. My personal take is that it is better to start as a perfectionist and learn which corners you can safely cut. Your bias may be different.

We see this tension between efficiency and competency everywhere. It is right here on our forum! You can almost plot people on the spectrum by their response to the thread about how long it takes to finish a song.

GMaq wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 3:27 pmI would think/hope showing some facility on the aluminum ladder might be a better way to fulfill climbing the corporate one..

It's oftentimes counter-intuitive.

GMaq wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 3:32 pm

folderol wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 12:30 pm Yep. I see this all the time, to the extent that these days I do as much as I possibly can myself - even if it requires learning completely new skills and buying tools I'll only ever use once

Last year I restored and old fireplace in my lounge that a couple of building firms couldn't be done without the entire chimney breast collapsing - presumably they'd never heard of wedged props.

Hi Will,

I can't say I'm surprised to see you pop up here, I would have guessed you're a man with many skills.

Sadly often the 'possibility' of a job falls hand in hand with the ambition of the contractor to do it..

Hi Glen,

The vast majority of people in my generation are multi-skilled. It was a matter of necessity after WW2.

P.S.

My mum as one of the 'land girls' learned how to service anything from tractors to Landrovers. It caused much consternation in later years when garages would try to pull the wool over her eyes, and she was able to tell them exactly what the problem was - in detail

ufug wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 4:23 pm

Michael Willis wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 3:19 am I was waiting for the punchline and then it just fizzled out.

Three free screws!

Seriously, I laughed my install off.

Three Free Screws!!!

OMG I should have let you write this, that's brilliant!!

folderol wrote: ↑Thu Apr 09, 2020 12:50 pm
Hi Glen,

The vast majority of people in my generation are multi-skilled. It was a matter of necessity after WW2.

P.S.

My mum as one of the 'land girls' learned how to service anything from tractors to Landrovers. It caused much consternation in later years when garages would try to pull the wool over her eyes, and she was able to tell them exactly what the problem was - in detail

That's a very good point! Nothing better to test your potential to learn how to do something than to know nobody else is going to show up and do it for you..

I loved the story about your Mum... it would have been fun to see those male mechanics come to realize they had picked the wrong lady to mess with!