"You will be at home Thursday?" The woman's
clear, modulated telephone voice took me by surprise.
"Pardon me?" I asked.
"This is the office of Telnor. You will be at
home Thursday? Or Friday?"
"Is this about WiMax?" I had been waiting
several months for Telnor to exercise their old communication
hardware for the purpose of announcing the arrival of
their new system.
'Yes."
"You are going to install WiMax on Thursday?"
There was a brief pause. "Or Friday," she
cautiously added.
"Yes I will be here," I assured her. Then
I hung up and told all my friends.
Thursday arrived and passed with no sign of an installation
truck. So did Friday. I did not grab my chest and sputter
in breathless disbelief.
The weekend quietly went by. Monday and Tuesday followed
suit. On Wednesday I phoned the local Telnor office
and was given the installer's cell phone number. As
I was talking to him I walked out to my driveway and
saw a man standing on the roof of a house a hundred
yards away, talking into his cell phone. I waved to
him. An hour later he was at my gate holding a work
order with my name on it.
I knew the afternoon's biggest hurdle was going to
be the mast where the old Prodigy Aire antenna now resided.
It sat near the peak of a 25 foot high, three inch diameter
metal pole. The trouble was, the pole weighed about
as much as a Grand Trunk Railroad Pullman car. I had
installed the mast to clear the roof line of my neighbor's
house. Otherwise there was no signal.
Prior to the unexpedited Thursday arrival of the installer,
I had unearthed the base of the pole and with the prodigious
help of a friend, unplugged it from the earth. It now
leaned against my office wall. It had been a relatively
painless extraction. But I knew uncorking the thing
was not the same as lowering it to the ground and then
raising it back up again.
Edgardo, Telnor's privately contracted installer, had
arrived with a helper. With my assistance and after
several false starts, the Moe-Larry-Curly team managed
to get the ponderous Space Needle lowered onto the top
of my tool trailer. A seven foot step ladder bridged
the gap and allowed Edgardo to bolt the new antenna
on the shaft.
A roll of coax cable was played out and fed through
a hole I had drilled in my office floor. Zip ties were
used to secure the cable to the pole. Then the Three
Stooges performed a crowd favorite, the one immortalized
by that famous photo taken after the Battle of Iwo Jima.
We struggled heroically to get that damn pole back in
the air. Unfortunately the thing insisted on behaving
like someone on methamphetamine doing a River Dance.
We were using a two prong fork welded to a pole to push
it upright. But every time we rallied for an offensive,
the mast would leap to the right. When we tried to correct
its malfeasance, it would leap to the left or try to
perform a barrel roll.
After a quarter of an hour of this, small ocotillo
and aloe plants began to spring up at our feet, nourished
by the copious quantities of sweat we were decanting
onto the desert sand. I finally hit on the idea of using
a heavy iron ladder as a kind of Border Collie to prevent
the mast from wandering into the territory of torn ligaments
and dislocated shoulders. The strategy worked. As we
inched the ladder forward, persecuting our quarry with
the giant pickle fork, the antenna slowly climbed into
the sky like a dawning sun. When it neared the noon
position, the base of the pole fell into the hole I
had prepared for it.
Over the next three hours I discovered why the rollout
of WiMax was progressing so slowly. It is because nearly
all the modems supplied to the installer have not been
properly configured. He went through eight modems before
he found one that responded to the signal. He tested
several more to find a good one for the next customer
on his list. Near the end of his visit, my office floor
was tiled with inert modems.
The telephone half of the internet/phone package is
extremely unreliable. In fact, my new phone number does
not work at all. I don't even get a dial tone. But the
old phone was left in place and this gives Telnor some
breathing room to iron out the bugs with the phones.
The new(er) internet technology is much faster than
the old. This could ultimately prove to be beneficial
to our health. There is no longer time to drive to a
local restaurant or prepare a three course meal while
a page loads. In fact, there's not even time to go to
the bathroom. With this new speed, it is only a matter
of time before some enterprising soul responds to its
business potential and introduces a Meals-on-Wheels
enterprise. I'm sure the tips would be generous if they
cut our food for us too.
Wait until the last thumbnails loads
then click on the first one to start the slide show.
