Smart Home, Dumb Owner

I recently purchased a house in Orange Park Florida. During the final walk through I found this electronic creature. I have since affectionately named it “The Octopus”. Over the past six weeks, I’ve had three service techs come inspect it. Each tech received my plea “Can you fix this? Can you make sense of this scary jumble?”

The first set of eyes was the Comcast installer. He happily spent over an hour unhooking ALL of the cable connections in the house to provide me with the 3 I asked for. Had Comcast clearly explained to me that if more than 3 connections were found than they would be unhooking the rest. Had I have known this little detail, I would have thought about my final answer a bit more. How was I supposed to know how many connections the house had? I wasn’t even living in it yet!

Needless to say, I had at least 20 cable connections in the house. Each connection was already hooked up – power boosters and all. Much to my surprise the Comcast tech wasted over an hour of his time locating every wire to either disconnect or leave as is! Comcast – I’m not impressed with you thus far.

I tried picking the brain of the Comcast guy “Do you know any networking guru who could make sense of these wires?” The kid was mum. “I cannot recommend anybody. I cannot promote any other business besides Comcast.”

Ok robot. “Do you need Website or Graphic Design Services?” He ignored me.

I pressed him some more. Maybe he’d help a girl out. “Ok, so in your PROFESSIONAL OPINION is this safe? All these wires are just hanging here… they would be leaning against clothes… who would you call if this was in your own home?”

He ignored me & kept unhooking wires. $253.94 later I had a measly three cable tv connections, high speed internet & phone service. Yey me. What a bargain.

Tech two, the electrician. The local electrician simply shook his head and said “oooooh no” upon seeing my octopus. Poor kid. He was speechless.

Tech three, the electrician’s boss. Electrician senior gave me some hope. “hmmm, well (pulling wires here, giving a tug there) let me think about this one for a bit. I’ll call you back in a few days with some ideas.”

He never called back.

Tech four. Home-run! By pure happenstance a friend had a home theater installed and my friendly octopus made its way into the conversation. Supposedly the home theater guy actually knew what CAT5 was!

Here’s our octopus now. I can’t thank Tim Murphy of Elite Home Theater enough! Troubleshooting, rewiring the CAT5, and staying the course through a burnt up router. Now my smart home is up and running. Can I keep up?

Tim also hooked me up with a fantastic new 46″ Samsung LED TV. The UN46B6000 has jaw dropping picture quality. Tim installed the wall bracket, got the surround sound functioning correctly, set up two house zones, set-up and iPod doc, the Wii and programmed the Monster remote to run it all.

I’m in technological utopia.

Now if only the remote could control the husband and children better.