I get caught out again!
They say no good deed goes unpunished, and I certainly walked into this one.
I was on a roof yesterday replacing a bunch of old aerials with a shiny new one for some new occupants of a bungalow, when I noticed that the neighbouring property, which shared the same chimney stack, had some problems with their aerials. They had a new aerial, somewhat inexpertly installed but otherwise fine, apparently serving a single room, and a very old aerial whose cable seemed to have been cut at some time in the past and had been joined by simply twisting the wires together and winding insulating tape around it. (Sorry no picture. Wasn’t thinking.) Not only would a join like that play havoc with the signal, but it would admit water that could work its way down and damage the TV equipment. For that reason, I suspected that it was not in use, especially as the household also had a satellite dish serving three rooms. Being too helpful for my own good, I knocked on their door and offered to take it down for free, seeing as I was on roof already. And it never harms to make ones services known.
The householder was not in, but her father was babysitting. After some thinking, we decided to undo the dodgy connection (I could hardly bring myself to leave it like that now I had seen it anyway) and the father would check that the TVs in the house were still functioning. That done, he gave the go-ahead to remove the aerial and mast, which I did, snipping the chimney lashing and cutting the cables off as short as I could.
Five minutes later he emerged again to announce that the dining room TV wasn’t working any more and ask if I could I connect it up again.
Now, the good lady of the house has returned from her afternoon to find, through no fault of her own, that she has no TV signal in the dining room. I am now honour-bound to spend my time repairing the system, which will involve amplifying and splitting off the signal from the new aerial (which is how it ought to have been done in the first place). And we can’t blame the father, who was put on the spot unexpectedly and just didn’t think about the other telly till it was too late. One of those things!
But every cloud has a silver lining. The lady has already recommended me to a friend (no hard feelings, obviously!) and she gets a system that will last somewhat longer than the old one would have.
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