el crispito

We were out shopping when the central office called to tell us that the installer would be arriving within 15 minutes. We were 30 minutes away from our apartment on foot, so we called our friend Larry and, waking him up from a peaceful slumber, asked if he'd be so kind as to go over to our apartment (it's three-and-a-half blocks away) and be there so that the guy wouldn't show up and find nobody home, thereby probably making us start over again from scratch scheduling a new appointment. We jumped in a cab and raced back to the apartment ourselves, where we found Larry by himself. We hung out and chatted a bit, and after a little over an hour, Larry called the central office to see what was keeping them. Of course, they have no contact with the installers, and we were told that they were probably delayed at the previous job.

Larry went home. At 5 PM, the installers show up at our apartment and take a look around. They tell me that they can't run the cable between the walls, so we will have to have a cable snaking around the entire living room to get it where we want it, in the middle of the room. Fine. As long as we have Internet access, I'm cool with that. They drill a hole in the wall next to our side balcony, running the cables in through there. They have run them down from the roof around the side of the building, where they are equally obvious as they are running across the top of the kitchen doorway, around the entryway, over the front door, down the side of the entryway and across the "floorboards" (what do you call them when they're tile?).

They tell me that the Internet access won't be set up until the next day, or the day after that, maybe. For some reason, they can only run the cables; they cannot hand you a box with the cable modem that takes maybe two minutes to hook up and notify the central office that you've got it going. No, different guy has to come out and do that. Before leaving though, they did share some of the soup I had made during the nearly three-hour cable running process, and we chatted about Guadalajara and the metro area. They were really nice guys. Unfortunately, I only had dinky little prep bowls and plastic spoons to serve it with.

All day on Saturday I waited and hoped. I'm getting pretty good about not really expecting things to happen, not when I want them to, nor when they're supposed to, so fortunately, you are spared a long-winded yet possibly witty description of my eager anticipation of the "big event." Yet what I didn't expect was that they'd show up on Sunday, and I certainly would have preferred that they not show up at 9:30 AM while we are dead asleep. Still, to get Internet access at home, I'd suffer much more and gladly, so we let the second string in to set up the modem.

Open box. Remove modem. Plug modem into the wall. Screw in the coax. Call the central office.

The second part took less than five minutes, and while it was very slow at first, after 30 minutes or so I reset the modem and boom! We had high-speed connectivity, put into radio waves by my nifty little AirPort Express.

From the time of placing the order, it took nine days and seventeen hours to be up and running. Not exactly speedy, but probably still better than Qwest...especially since it worked the first time.