Unplug. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Haven’t seen many posts lately? That’s because a week and a half ago, I came home to dis­cover my cable modem blink­ing dis­con­so­lately. I called my cable provider, Cox (please keep all puns to your­self, not that they don’t deserve them, pin­heads). They walked me through the unplug-plug-reboot-tighten-lather-rinse rou­tine, and told me the coax split­ter I was using (the one labeled “Cox”) was bad. I should replace it.

So I went on vacation.

When we got back, I bought a new split­ter. (Actu­ally, I got one free from our local, and awe­some, home stereo spe­cial­ist store.) I tried it. No dice.

So I called Cox back. Lather, rinse, repeat.

“Yeah sir, your cable sig­nal is really low.”

“Oh? It’s been fine for the last eleven months.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah. So. Like, I can have a tech come out to see what he can do?”

Inter­lude dur­ing which the Cox rep tries very hard to sell me the $3.95-monthly-service cov­er­ing “con­nec­tion prob­lems inside your home.” Which I think means, “if you crammed your coax cable into your S-Video out­let, we’ll plug it into the right place for you.” We turned down their offer.

“Okay, so when can you send a guy out?”

“Oh, well, how about Mon­day? We have a slot from 9:00 am to 11:00 am?”

“No, I’m sorry, your wildly incon­ve­nient time a week from now won’t work for my sched­ule. You see, I have a day job, in order to pay my monthly hundred-dollar Cox bill.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, we have a slot from 5 to 7 on Tuesday.”

“Um.” “Sure, I’ll leave work early to be home at 5 so your guy can show up at 7:15. Sounds great.”

So, then, I went out to Best Buy and bought some very expen­sive (and very high qual­ity, the pack­age assures me) coax cables. I plug every­thing in, and voila! A sig­nal! Which then dies. Then comes back! Then flut­ters and dies again.

So, finally, I unplug the cable modem and plug it in some­where else in the house, where I don’t need a split­ter (I had all my elec­tron­ics in one big power and video and speaker wire orgy out of sight behind the enter­tain­ment center).

And now it works. So I’m back.