Seeing all this ballyhoo about Gustav shaking things up in New Orleans has me remembering when my brother-in-law and I went down to Baton Rouge to do the DISH service calls there.
The rates were whorish I got to admit. They were $45 apiece but we could each accomplish 15 a day. Once we got it figured out that most of these were fried LNBs or re-peaking the dish, we could get each one done in about 20 to 30 minutes. Heck, we could have done more than 15 a day but the problem was traffic. Oh my god, the problem was traffic. So many people were homeless and had nothing better to do than to just drive around town. It wasn't like they had someplace to go. They were just zombies in cars. It took longer to drive 2 miles to the next job than to do the job itself.
We stayed at another tech's house in Morganton?, not sure I got that city right. Drove all the way to BR each morning and all the way back. That was as close as we could get. Gas prices weren't too bad but we couldn't fill up in BR, had to do it in Morganton where the gas stations weren't off their rocker.
The real trouble was the company that we were getting the work from was also a DirecTV dealer. Well, they were getting all sorts of customers since some of the smaller cable systems were effectively going to be out of business for months. I think one of them even called it quits, told their subs to get a dish. Anyways, the retail jobs only paid $60/20 and that wasn't worth it since I could have easily rolled up 4 or 5 service calls in the same amount of time with less materials. So, they tried to tell us there were no service calls one day but that we could do the DTV installs if we wanted to work. Told them, that's alright, we'll just take the day off and recuperate. They tried it again the next day and I told them if they didn't have a full route of service calls the next day that we were packing up and heading out. So they gave us a full route and then the day after they tried it again. Told them to send the check, we were done.
I seen the ad on here that was looking for storm techs for DNS. Problem is they only pay $40 sub rates for SCs and with gas the way it is, and DISH wanting service techs to re-install every crappy install from 1997 for the price of a service call, eff that. I'd consider it if the pay were up in the $55-60 range and had a no QC chargeback clause, just fix it and go.
Gustav Reminds Me Of Katrina
Member #: 40846
Registered: 9/19/2005
Posted:
1493
Name:
Duane Vick
Name:
Duane Vick
Company:
Self-Employed
Occupation:
Installer
Location:
Phoenix AZ
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