Alan the Cable Guy

Twenty years ago, when I first bought this building, I had my friend Garrett crawl through the rat infested attic with a length of coaxial cable. When he got over the bedroom closet of the front apartment we drilled a hole and Garrett dropped the cable through it. Ah, the good old days, when it was so easy to steal cable television. Just order one television to be hooked up and then like an octopus, send cable out to the whole place through the attic. Just a couple of years into that I cancelled cable and ordered Directv. Directv is a bit more complicated than standard cable, so I had to stop offering free cable television to my tenants. That was when the era of cable and satellite installers started. With each new tenant and each new television service provider, new cable had to be strung. So on the side of the house where the dogs poop I allowed the installers to string cable along the fascia and drill holes through the wall. The problem was that they never removed the old cable when switching over to something new. It looked awful with a dozen cables strung along the length of the house. All the nails, screws, and staples used to attach those cables were starting to cause the fascia to rot. So last week I pulled out a ladder, climbed up to the side of the roof, and started ripping down the cables. I cut them, I pulled on them, and in the end I had a few hundred feet of coaxial cable laying on the ground. The only problem with going at it with wire cutters and a crowbar is the fact that I could of accidentally ripped out one of my tenants cable service, or even worse mine. Luckily I did neither. Sometimes nothing goes wrong when I do a home project, which makes for a rather boring blog post. No smashed fingers, no electrocution, no falling off the ladder, everything went as planned. Sorry, I'll try harder next time.