My last post in this series started to cover my transition from working at Radio Shack to working for Servcom Maintenance.

Check it out now if you didn't get a chance to read it before. I give an explanation of the company and how it was setup.

As I think I mentioned, Servcom had a contract with Charter Communications(now Spectrum) at the time. That is what the lower techs spent most of their time on.

When a person would sign up for high speed Internet via a cable modem, Charter would create two copies of the work order. One copy would go to the cable guy (usually a contractor with another company) to run the lines from the road to their house/apartment/trailer. A second copy of the work order would then come to us.

It was our job to follow the cable guys around and go into the residence after the cabling was done. An average day consisted of anywhere between five to sometimes ten or eleven workorders a piece. We would have a cable modem and it was our job to get that connected to the customers computer and then show them how to access the Internet and their email.

This may seem dumb to a lot of you that are reading this, but back then high speed Internet was a huge shift from the dial-up that most people were used to. Internet based email was pretty rare, so most people needed their Outlook or Outlook Express configured with incoming and outgoing mail server settings.

Likewise there were also many people still using AOL. Those customers required us to set their computer to stop using the traditional modem to connect and instead use the "always on" cable modem connection.

Some of the newer modems that Charter was giving us were capable of being connected via USB, but many people were still running Windows 98 so our techs preferred the method of connection that required installing a network card in the customers computer.

This was much more intrusive because we had to open the customers machine to install the card, but it proved to be a more stable connection. We had to carefully document any issues we noticed with the computer before opening it up otherwise the customer would be sure to blame whatever was wrong on us. Even if it had nothing to do with the work we had done.

I still remember a call where the customer was living in a beautiful condo on the shorefront of Lake Huron. The house probably cost more than I would make in five to ten years and the lady wanted to get high speed Internet service for her 486 computer. That's right, it wasn't even a Pentium. I spent a good two hours trying to get it to work and when I finally did I had to explain to her that it would still seem slow, but only because her computer was old, not because of the service.

Not surprisingly, the customer called in to Charter a short time later complaining that her service was slow. Charter called Servcom wanting to know what we had done to the customers computer. After I explained to them that it was a 486 they understood the issue and I believe the customer was encouraged to buy a new machine.

A short time after I started working at Servcom, Charter started giving out some of their jobs to a second contractor. It wasn't long before our company was handling both the jobs they gave us and going to the houses where the other contractor had been to fix the things they had broke.

In the beginning it was a really great gig, it reqiured a lot of driving, but we got a car allowance and they also provided us a Nextel cellphone with push to talk so they could keep in contact with us.

This was before GPS and Smartphones so I kept a map of the two cities that we covered in my car at all times and I got to know road names and locations in each one very well.

I was still living with my parents at the time and each night I had to go home to a dial-up Internet connection when all day I had been installing high speed for other people. My parents lived in an area where cable modem access wasn't available, so it was a major bummer.

As I said, things were going really well and I was beginning to build a good bond with the other workers there. Changes were coming though and soon everything would be thrown askew. More about that next time!

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