Who Ever Expects The Cable Guy To Show Up On Time?

Carl Schott, the cable guy, has a slightly skewed view of how things work at the cable company.

Carl has broken the cable cardinal rule, the unspoken, unwritten and unrecorded code that mobile service technicians follow like a blue-collar oath of fealty. It is a moral belief system that has been in place since time immortal. Never show up on time.

Carl didn't know. He was only trying to provide quality customer service, something he was taught when he worked in retail as a teenager. It was impossible for him to know that he was threatening a foundation of principles as time-honoured as the Masons, the Church, or the SPCA.

"We have a system here that works," said cable representative Michael Venson. "There's a reason why we schedule our service calls, and an even better reason why we don't adhere to those schedules. I'm just glad we got to Carl before he upset too many clients with his perplexing punctuality and unexpected efficiency."

Like the phone company, the gas company, and the electric company, customers have a reasonable expectation of service from the cable company, an expectation established after years of cleverly organized tradition. When the cable company says they'll show up between 8:00am and 4:30pm, the customer knows that they won't hear from the technician until 4:45pm, if he shows up at all. The cable company goes out of its way to provide that extra bit of service of not showing up when they're expected to, allowing the customer time extra hours of free time to sleep late, work on a hobby, or complete household chores they otherwise wouldn't have time to do. If the technician showed up "on time", the customer would have to go to work or run errands, unpleasant alternatives that would certainly disrupt their entire day.

"And if we were to start meeting the expectations of customers, those expectations would go up, making it impossible to satisfy any service demands," said Michael. "It's far better that we maintain the mystique--nobody knows if the serviceman is on a call, on his way to the next site, or asleep in his van. It's all part of the expectation of reasonable service."

"A service call is like an episode of Star Trek," added Michael. "Scotty would always tell Captain Kirk that it's going to take a couple of space days to fix the ship, but he could usually have it done in a couple of space hours. That's a pretty typical scenario there, and we try to emulate it here."

It seems that Carl has learned from his initial mistakes, as he was supposed to be here at 9:30 this morning to hook up HBO, Superchannel, and the 24-hour Wicker Network, and still hasn't shown up. Bless his heart.