TeacherScribe

Ever since the trees in our backyard bloomed, our DirecTV reception has been poor, especially on the local channels, which do not even come in.  This, of course, rendered American Idol and all local news a smattering of broken images - if not a completely black screen with a blue box in the lower left corner that reads "Unable to receive signal from receiver 1." Thus, I called DirecTV.  After wrestling with their damned answering machine (I'd take someone who cannot decipher my northern accent or someone in India of those machines any day), I was able to talk to a real live person. They put in a service call.  A person would be there Tuesday between 4 and 8 to adjust the satellite dish. I was thoroughly impressed then when I got home and saw a DirecTV van parked outside.  As I pulled around back and got out with Kenzie, I saw the employee come around to the back of the house, where our satellite dish is mounted on the right side of our roof. He cocked an eye at the dish, pointed to a branch, and said, "That one is your problem.  Cut that one, and it'll work fine."  He went on to say that he didn't really want to move the dish to the garage, which, to me, seemed like it would remedy all of our problems.  However, I wanted the reception to improve as quickly as possible and trimming one branch was fine with me. Now I should say here that a few summers ago when our reception was interrupted, I trimmed the hell out of that tree.  Basically, I massacred the tree.  Kristie was not impressed since I made our tree look like some deformed mutant with bare limbs shorn off at odd angles. By the time I went to the garage to grab the tree trimmer, the DirecTV worker as gone. I trimmed the branch and went inside to check the reception. The same.   So much for a service call. I phoned DirecTV again.  The person on the other end was not impressed with the DirecTV service tech.  He informed me that the tech was not to leave the house until every receiver and TV was working properly. I wish I would have known that! Now I have to wait until Thursday to have the dish relocated. I just hope it's not the same tech guy.  He'll probably have me move the dish myself