Aerial

We’d arranged for a company to come out and install a TV aerial today, as the previous owner/occupier of our house only had cable TV. Cable is all very well, but you have to pay for it, and the extra channels you get over and above Freeview don’t seem to be worth bothering with;  and you have to pay extra extra to get the Sky channels – films and sports. We really don’t watch enough TV to make this worthwhile. The company arranged for him to show up at 4pm which I thought was cutting things a bit fine, as it gets dark at around 5pm at the moment.

Just before noon, they called to see if the engineer could come round earlier as they had  a gap in their schedule. “How much earlier?” I asked.“ Straight away” came the reply. As we were “busy” in a café drinking coffee and doing the crossword at the time, I said “no, can they come later?”  “sure, we’ll be there in about 10 minutes.”

About an hour later, he showed up. So that’s “straight away”. He located the junction box from the cable company, installed the aerial, had a lot of trouble with the wall socket due to the previous installer’s incompetence (lots of sucking in through teeth, “what cowboy put this in?” etc, in the traditional tradesman style) as they’d assumed that all future people would only want cable, so hadn’t threaded the aerial cable through properly.

It took him around two hours to get everything sorted, which meant that it was nearly 3pm by the time we were able to sit down to lunch! We were pretty famished by then. But it was a good job he’d come early, otherwise he’d have been working in the dark.

Anyway, we now have working TV once more. In true NZ style, there wasn’t anything worth watching on a Saturday night, so we watched a DVD instead. Go figure.