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Rigger's Diary: today
I've been working on one of four blocks of flats that face each other
across a green. The van and the activity have been highly visible, and of course it's been like poking a hornets' nest with a ****ty stick. Net curtains have twitched, and the complaints have started to arrive at the housing office. The housing manager emailed me thus: 'Have you been drumming up business on there?' He knows really that allegedly poor TV reception is infectious. It can spread through a complex like a rumour of free beer at Tescos. Between us we decided to respond to a sample of the complaints, just to get an idea of whether the other systems needed a refurb. The block I’ve been working on was built a couple of years before the others, and the TV system has always been a problem. The others have not generated complaints for ages; in fact until the other day I hadn’t set foot in two of them. All of the blocks really need new systems with satellite, but that isn’t going to happen. I walked across the green to have a bit of a look round. There was one mini-dish visible. It was on a front wall near the right hand end of the building, angled to ‘look’ along the wall, yet it couldn’t see 28.2E I was sure. I walked round the back of two of the ‘unexplored’ blocks to have a look at the aerials. There was no aerial, but there was a lot of dishes, and seeing them made it obvious that the one on the front wall couldn’t be looking at any point on the Clarke belt. I knocked on a door. I was shown an aged 14” portable in the living room with a very snowy analogue BBC1 and a perfect analogue BBC2. In the bedroom was a massive plasma with a very snowy analogue BBC2 and a perfect analogue BBC1. “I do all my viewing in bed, you see, but if I want to watch BBC2 I have to go in the room.” “Annoying!” “Oh, I’ve got used to it. It’s been like that for five years. I take the duvet.” ITV and C4 were similarly confusing. There was no C5. The two TV sets were both fed from a ‘booster’ in the living room. The analyser showed me that signals from two relays were present. One is Gp A and a bit weak in the area, the other is Gp CD and very strong in the area. The normal main station would be Emley Moor, but there was almost no signal from that transmitter. I shouldn’t have done it before I’d investigated the system further but I re-tuned the two TV sets to the Gp CD relay and astonished the resident with the results. Rather than addressing me he delightedly explained the matter to his cat. “Oh, Sigmund, the nice man has made our televisions better! We can watch BBC2 in bed!” I went to the flat of the one of the other main complainers in that block. She was very nice. She put the telly on and said I looked weary, and served tea in a teapot on a tray, and exotic chocolate biscuits, and told me her life story, which in its small way was astonishing. She went on to tell me how she had lost patience with the housing people and had told the residents in the flat above that they must get their leaking pipes fixed or she would ‘call in the heavy mob’. I raised an eyebrow. “Pure bluff!” she giggled. “But anyway, they sent for a plumber and he came, but he was totally drunk! Totally legless! It would have been excusable, but it was the day of an important football match, so you have to make allowances for these people. He was very argumentative though, and the handyman from the housing office was here as well, and he – the plumber chappy -- squared up to him and said he’d knock his block off! Well John the handyman is six foot six (although he’s very thin, I think there’s something wrong with him) and he’s a champion at ju jitso and he whispered to me ‘I’d better not touch him or I’d end up in prison.’ “John’s very good though. When that dreadful trollop moved out – I think she was on drugs – she hit the front door with a settee and the glass went. Of course I was out like a shot and I said to her ‘You’ll have to get that fixed or that’s your deposit gone my dear.’ So she got a bloke from the Yellow Pages. He charged £245 and it wasn’t safety glass. I told him to take it out again or he’d be prosecuted, so he did, and then John came round and put some safety glass in for £35. You see?’ I thought I saw. Eventually, many eons later, we discussed her TV reception. “I must tell you, I was quite content until Hercules discovered the digital. But once we had it I was aware that it wasn’t perfect, and I do like things to be, well, if not perfect, optimal.” I nodded in agreement. We were in agreement that ‘optimal’ was a reasonable life target, and there was a pause while we savoured the moment. The she reached for the remote and said to herself, “Now let me see, ‘DTV’ that’s it!” She stabbed the button, and a badly pixellated BBC News appeared. “As I said, I didn’t know it was there until Hercules found it.” “Err, Hercules?” She gestured towards a morbidly obese tomcat that fully occupied (and in my opinion threatened to stain) a beautiful Georgian chair, one of four. “He sat on the zapper, and lo and behold I had digital! Isn’t he clever?” I agreed that he was. The analyser showed almost no DTT. The Gp A relay has DTT but no analogue C5. The last complainer turned out to have the dish on the north-facing front wall. I enquired about it. He had moved in and had been frustrated by the lack of any useable digital reception, so had bought a Freesat box. The shop had sent someone out to do the dish. The someone had said it couldn’t be done at the price and had ‘just buggered off without so much as a by your leave, you just can’t believe these people’, so the resident’s partner had had some sort of a butch paddy fit when he came home from his work and called in a local installer, who had bolted a dish to the front wall, messed around with it for ‘an age’, then simply disappeared, much like the first one. The Freesat box sat below the TV set, useless. I explained that the satellites were all to the south, so those in flats with north-east and north-west facing walls couldn’t just put a dish on their external walls. “Well that,” he said, “Is just typical unfairness! Isn’t it just like everything else in this country?” The buildings have very steep pitched roofs. There are four quite large flats on each of four floors, and the roof comes to a central apex. From this I could have worked out that the loft above the stairway would be unusual, if I’d thought about it, but in fact I was astonished when I poked my head up through the hatch. I could see two aerials, about 30ft above me. I had to make a platform in the loft and then haul a large ladder up there to stand on it. With the ladder well secured I ascended and found two contract Gp A aerials, reposing on the rafters, unfastened and unaligned. This place is actually on high ground, and reception was random, with strong analogue on Gp CD (meant for the nearby valley), weak analogue and digi from the Gp A relay, and a little bit of analogue and DTT from Emley Moor. There was even a bit of Waltham and Belmont in there. Bizarrely, the first aerial was connected to the second, and the one downlead went to a Labgear 6+1 amp. The ‘full’ output went to another Labgear 6+1 amp, which was well into crossmod. I found that the Gp A relay would provide more-than-adequate signal levels for both analogue and DTT, so I installed a proper aerial, a log, and sorted the amps out. Getting the ladder out of the loft and down the stairs was hard work because I had used up the day’s supply of energy. I then had to revisit the three flats to tune-in various things and consume more tea and biscuits, and listen to more tarradiddle. I posted the standard leaflets through the other doors. These basically say, “We came, you were out, try it and ring us if necessary.” But most of the others are using satellite, so they won’t respond. Bill |
Rigger's Diary: today
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Rigger's Diary: today
On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800 (PST), "
wrote: [snip very interesting story] Bill I'm feeling particularly helpful today so I'm saving IanT some work by pasting his usual replies for him... What was the name and address of the company that completed this installation? There should be no problem in you naming them if what you say is true as it will stop others being conned. Too many installers lie about other peoples work, then refuse to name the other company. One person in this group does it all the time. Do you think anyone is interested? |
Rigger's Diary: today
" wrote in message ... I've been working on one of four blocks of flats that face each other across a green. The van and the activity have been highly visible, and of course it's been like poking a hornets' nest with a ****ty stick. Net curtains have twitched, and the complaints have started to arrive at the housing office. The housing manager emailed me thus: 'Have you been drumming up business on there?' He knows really that allegedly poor TV reception is infectious. It can spread through a complex like a rumour of free beer at Tescos. Between us we decided to respond to a sample of the complaints, just to get an idea of whether the other systems needed a refurb. The block I’ve been working on was built a couple of years before the others, and the TV system has always been a problem. The others have not generated complaints for ages; in fact until the other day I hadn’t set foot in two of them. All of the blocks really need new systems with satellite, but that isn’t going to happen. I walked across the green to have a bit of a look round. There was one mini-dish visible. It was on a front wall near the right hand end of the building, angled to ‘look’ along the wall, yet it couldn’t see 28.2E I was sure. I walked round the back of two of the ‘unexplored’ blocks to have a look at the aerials. There was no aerial, but there was a lot of dishes, and seeing them made it obvious that the one on the front wall couldn’t be looking at any point on the Clarke belt. I knocked on a door. I was shown an aged 14” portable in the living room with a very snowy analogue BBC1 and a perfect analogue BBC2. In the bedroom was a massive plasma with a very snowy analogue BBC2 and a perfect analogue BBC1. “I do all my viewing in bed, you see, but if I want to watch BBC2 I have to go in the room.” “Annoying!” “Oh, I’ve got used to it. It’s been like that for five years. I take the duvet.” ITV and C4 were similarly confusing. There was no C5. The two TV sets were both fed from a ‘booster’ in the living room. The analyser showed me that signals from two relays were present. One is Gp A and a bit weak in the area, the other is Gp CD and very strong in the area. The normal main station would be Emley Moor, but there was almost no signal from that transmitter. I shouldn’t have done it before I’d investigated the system further but I re-tuned the two TV sets to the Gp CD relay and astonished the resident with the results. Rather than addressing me he delightedly explained the matter to his cat. “Oh, Sigmund, the nice man has made our televisions better! We can watch BBC2 in bed!” I went to the flat of the one of the other main complainers in that block. She was very nice. She put the telly on and said I looked weary, and served tea in a teapot on a tray, and exotic chocolate biscuits, and told me her life story, which in its small way was astonishing. She went on to tell me how she had lost patience with the housing people and had told the residents in the flat above that they must get their leaking pipes fixed or she would ‘call in the heavy mob’. I raised an eyebrow. “Pure bluff!” she giggled. “But anyway, they sent for a plumber and he came, but he was totally drunk! Totally legless! It would have been excusable, but it was the day of an important football match, so you have to make allowances for these people. He was very argumentative though, and the handyman from the housing office was here as well, and he – the plumber chappy -- squared up to him and said he’d knock his block off! Well John the handyman is six foot six (although he’s very thin, I think there’s something wrong with him) and he’s a champion at ju jitso and he whispered to me ‘I’d better not touch him or I’d end up in prison.’ “John’s very good though. When that dreadful trollop moved out – I think she was on drugs – she hit the front door with a settee and the glass went. Of course I was out like a shot and I said to her ‘You’ll have to get that fixed or that’s your deposit gone my dear.’ So she got a bloke from the Yellow Pages. He charged £245 and it wasn’t safety glass. I told him to take it out again or he’d be prosecuted, so he did, and then John came round and put some safety glass in for £35. You see?’ I thought I saw. Eventually, many eons later, we discussed her TV reception. “I must tell you, I was quite content until Hercules discovered the digital. But once we had it I was aware that it wasn’t perfect, and I do like things to be, well, if not perfect, optimal.” I nodded in agreement. We were in agreement that ‘optimal’ was a reasonable life target, and there was a pause while we savoured the moment. The she reached for the remote and said to herself, “Now let me see, ‘DTV’ that’s it!” She stabbed the button, and a badly pixellated BBC News appeared. “As I said, I didn’t know it was there until Hercules found it.” “Err, Hercules?” She gestured towards a morbidly obese tomcat that fully occupied (and in my opinion threatened to stain) a beautiful Georgian chair, one of four. “He sat on the zapper, and lo and behold I had digital! Isn’t he clever?” I agreed that he was. The analyser showed almost no DTT. The Gp A relay has DTT but no analogue C5. The last complainer turned out to have the dish on the north-facing front wall. I enquired about it. He had moved in and had been frustrated by the lack of any useable digital reception, so had bought a Freesat box. The shop had sent someone out to do the dish. The someone had said it couldn’t be done at the price and had ‘just buggered off without so much as a by your leave, you just can’t believe these people’, so the resident’s partner had had some sort of a butch paddy fit when he came home from his work and called in a local installer, who had bolted a dish to the front wall, messed around with it for ‘an age’, then simply disappeared, much like the first one. The Freesat box sat below the TV set, useless. I explained that the satellites were all to the south, so those in flats with north-east and north-west facing walls couldn’t just put a dish on their external walls. “Well that,” he said, “Is just typical unfairness! Isn’t it just like everything else in this country?” The buildings have very steep pitched roofs. There are four quite large flats on each of four floors, and the roof comes to a central apex. From this I could have worked out that the loft above the stairway would be unusual, if I’d thought about it, but in fact I was astonished when I poked my head up through the hatch. I could see two aerials, about 30ft above me. I had to make a platform in the loft and then haul a large ladder up there to stand on it. With the ladder well secured I ascended and found two contract Gp A aerials, reposing on the rafters, unfastened and unaligned. This place is actually on high ground, and reception was random, with strong analogue on Gp CD (meant for the nearby valley), weak analogue and digi from the Gp A relay, and a little bit of analogue and DTT from Emley Moor. There was even a bit of Waltham and Belmont in there. Bizarrely, the first aerial was connected to the second, and the one downlead went to a Labgear 6+1 amp. The ‘full’ output went to another Labgear 6+1 amp, which was well into crossmod. I found that the Gp A relay would provide more-than-adequate signal levels for both analogue and DTT, so I installed a proper aerial, a log, and sorted the amps out. Getting the ladder out of the loft and down the stairs was hard work because I had used up the day’s supply of energy. I then had to revisit the three flats to tune-in various things and consume more tea and biscuits, and listen to more tarradiddle. I posted the standard leaflets through the other doors. These basically say, “We came, you were out, try it and ring us if necessary.” But most of the others are using satellite, so they won’t respond. Bill A good story! I can imagine being there myself.....I particularly emphasise with the "used up the day’s supply of energy" as I get this feeling quite often when faced with similar ladder hauling exercises. The worst ones are always inside, trying to get access to a hatch of some decsription! My ladders split into 3 bits handily, and on several occasions I've had to split them down, and carry up 2 sections individually, up 5 or so flights of stairs, trying not to bash the walls and clothes line residents as you go. I always hope to be rewarded by finding a juicy array of botches up there..... |
Rigger's Diary: today
On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800, wrote:
In the bedroom was a massive plasma with a very snowy analogue BBC2 and a perfect analogue BBC1. No integrated digital TV tuner then? Did you explain to the resident the benefit of getting a digital converter box in order to watch non StretchyVision (tm) pictures on his expensive widescreen screen? |
Rigger's Diary: today
" wrote in message ... " and listen to more tarradiddle. ." Bill Indeed, that is what you subject this group to. If your story is not just another complete work of fiction, name the previous company that were responsible for the installations. There seems to be a typical sales pattern emerging here. Go to a job, say previous work is rubbish and then charge for everything to be done again. The only possible reasons you refuse to name previous companies is because either you lied to get the job or you are carrying out work that might not be required. Only you know which one it is - I know which I suspect. You are probably scared of Trading Standards investigating you and companies that will sue you for saying their work is substandard. Watch out as one day you might just be caught out. |
Rigger's Diary: today
wrote in message ... On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800 (PST), " wrote: [snip very interesting story] Bill I'm feeling particularly helpful today so I'm saving IanT some work by pasting his usual replies for him... See below ;-) |
Rigger's Diary: today
On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:57:49 -0000, "Doctor D"
wrote: wrote in message .. . On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800 (PST), " wrote: [snip very interesting story] Bill I'm feeling particularly helpful today so I'm saving IanT some work by pasting his usual replies for him... See below ;-) ROFL! I bet he wishes now he had read the other responses before rushing in. |
Rigger's Diary: today
I don't understand why you're so wound up about this.
-- Brian Gregory. (In the UK) To email me remove the letter vee. |
Rigger's Diary: today
"Brian Gregory [UK]" wrote in message
... I don't understand why you're so wound up about this. Brian Gregory. (In the UK) He must run flybynight aerials? Steve Terry -- Get a free Three 3pay Sim with £2 bonus after £10 top up http://freeagent.three.co.uk/stand/view/id/5276 |
Rigger's Diary: today
On Feb 16, 2:27*pm, J G Miller wrote:
On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:06:13 -0800, wrote: In the bedroom was a massive plasma with a very snowy analogue BBC2 and a perfect analogue BBC1. No integrated digital TV tuner then? Yes, but little or no signal. Did you explain to the resident the benefit of getting a digital converter box in order to watch non StretchyVision (tm) pictures on his expensive widescreen screen? Well, that sort of customer care isn't my job, because the resident isn't my customer, but in fact once the DTT had been made to work it's a no brainer for them to convert to digi. I don't need to tell them. They know. Bill |
Rigger's Diary: today
"Brian Gregory [UK]" wrote in message ... I don't understand why you're so wound up about this. He's a Daily Mail reader? |
Rigger's Diary: today
"IanT" wrote in message
... Indeed, that is what you subject this group to. If your story is not just another complete work of fiction, name the previous company that were responsible for the installations. There seems to be a typical sales pattern emerging here. Go to a job, say previous work is rubbish and then charge for everything to be done again. The only possible reasons you refuse to name previous companies is because either you lied to get the job or you are carrying out work that might not be required. Only you know which one it is - I know which I suspect. You are probably scared of Trading Standards investigating you and companies that will sue you for saying their work is substandard. Watch out as one day you might just be caught out. Fabulous! Where would we be without IanT to brighten our day? SteveT |
Rigger's Diary: today
In message , IanT
writes There seems to be a typical sales pattern emerging here. Go to a job, say previous work is rubbish and then charge for everything to be done again. You are totally out of touch with real life, possibly even reality. Just because he only posts about the bodged up jobs he encounters doesn't mean that all the jobs he goes to are like this. It's really easy to get into trouble posting details of companies who allegedly carried out previous work because you can't prove the job hasn't been 'fixed' by a mate of the caretaker for a few quid out of petty cash or even bodged up by a resident. It happens. There are also more underhand ways that bodge jobs happen. Of course, some 'companies' are just total cowboys (alarm wire used to run CCTV signals, CO-AX jointed with choc block etc. etc..) Similarly, some of the awful installs I have come across have been carried out by the sort of person you'd not want knocking on your door for fear of a good beating so all in, it's safer on many levels not to name them. Plus, it may also prejudice any legal action that may be taken against them in the future. Now welcome to my killfile, make yourself at home and don't expect to leave it. -- Clint Sharp |
Rigger's Diary: today
On Feb 20, 8:07*pm, Clint Sharp wrote:
In message , IanT writesThere seems to be a typical sales pattern emerging here. *Go to a job, say previous work is rubbish and then charge for everything to be done again. You are totally out of touch with real life, possibly even reality. Just because he only posts about the bodged up jobs he encounters doesn't mean that all the jobs he goes to are like this. That's a good point, but in fact I don't 'only post about bodged up jobs'. Such jobs are of course more worthy of comment than the normal run, but in fact I post about all sorts of other things. It's really easy to get into trouble posting details of companies who allegedly carried out previous work because you can't prove the job hasn't been 'fixed' by a mate of the caretaker for a few quid out of petty cash or even bodged up by a resident. It happens. There are also more underhand ways that bodge jobs happen. This is also a very good point. I inspect systems from time to time on behalf of landlords and propery managers when they suspect bad work. I then have to write a detailed report. This has to be forensically accurate and scrupulously fair. I have to make it plain that I can only report on what I see. I cannot make assumptions about the history of the thing. This means that I can't say, "The installers smashed 23 tiles when they fitted the aerial." I have to say, "There are 23 broken tiles in the area of roof near the aerial (see fig 26)." I can't say, "The installers made no attempt to adjust the terrestrial signal levels." I have to say, "The terrestrial signal levels at the output of the head end and the outputs of the repeaters were incorrect, being too high in some cases and too low in others. The relative levels of the analogue channels and digital multiplexes appeared to be random, but were in no case correct." Bill |
Rigger's Diary: today
In message
, " writes Just because he only posts about the bodged up jobs he encounters doesn't mean that all the jobs he goes to are like this. That's a good point, but in fact I don't 'only post about bodged up jobs'. On reflection, no of course you don't. IanT just caught me at a bad moment and my post wasn't perhaps as accurate as it could have been. I then have to write a detailed report. This has to be forensically accurate and scrupulously fair. I have to make it plain that I can only report on what I see. Of course, I often used to write them for customers too. Bill -- Clint Sharp |
Rigger's Diary: today
On Feb 21, 5:27*pm, Clint Sharp wrote:
In message , " writes Just because he only posts about the bodged up jobs he encounters doesn't mean that all the jobs he goes to are like this. That's a good point, but in fact I don't 'only post about bodged up jobs'. On reflection, no of course you don't. IanT just caught me at a bad moment and my post wasn't perhaps as accurate as it could have been. Ian T catches us all at a bad moment. Merely reading one of his posts makes any moment a bad one. Anyway, I was being a bit pedantic. Bill |
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