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The technician returned today ready to do the install.  By “ready” I mean “lacking the basic tools do the job” and “do the install” I mean “ask me repeatedly to help him”.  He was about 5’6″ and completely incapable of accessing the cabling in our drop ceiling so every time he had to thread something I was the one on the stool.  I should have just grabbed him by the legs and shoved him into the ceiling.  During the process, he did discover that the previous wiring job was done via Narnia as there was a wall where two cables went in and three went out.

During the process I learned that the term “drop ceiling” comes from “droupe sheallang”  which is old English for “place where mice poop”.

At least my dad has The History Channel in time to see “Grover Cleveland and the Occult: The Nazi Diaries” or what ever tripe pseudohistory they’re peddling.

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I left work early to meet the FiOS technician who was install my father’s TV service.  Four months without the Mystical Hitler/Bigfoot History Channel rendered him near catatonic and he clawed open his wallet to fix it.  The technician arrived and things went poorly quickly:

Him: Where’s your existing install? We’ll need to replace the router with something that supports the TV service.
Me: NO!!! NOT ABRAHAM LINKSYS! There’s got to be another way to do it.
Him: Nope, the new router manages port forwarding and DNS to get the menu stuff.
Me: So you’re telling me that not only are you going to take my router but you’ll prevent me from custom DNS lookups?
Him: Yes.
Me: Well, can’t we do it as a separate install?
Him: If you were an apartment conplex yes, but if you were you’d need a commercial service.
Me: In fact, this floor is zoned separately from the ground floor.  I board here but this closet is shared as part of a communications easement [Editor’s Note: At this point, I began spewing a collection of bullshit that caused the portion of my brain responsible for memory to go into shock.  All I remember is that I ended with “so that’s why there’s an exterior door in my bedroom” and he nodded in agreement.]

I don’t think he actually bought what I said so much as he realized the potential problem caused by disturbing a possibly unstable fat white guy who named his router “Abraham Linksys”.  Sometimes looking a little batshit crazy helps.