Warning: The old customer who's fine with ancient connectors

I was at a house this week doing a simple service upgrade. The guy had been with the same provider for like twenty years. When I got into the crawl space, I found the original coaxial connectors, the kind that need a special tool we haven't used in a decade. The signal was actually passing through okay, just a bit weak. My job ticket only said to hook up the new box. The ethical pinch was right there. I could have just connected to the old line, done my thirty minutes of work, and left. The customer wouldn't know the difference right away. But I knew those old fittings would cause problems down the line, probably within a year. I ended up spending an extra hour of my own time rerunning a fresh line with proper connectors. He didn't get charged for it. My boss would call that a waste of time if he found out. But I'd rather lose an hour than have that guy call in six months with a failed signal because I took the easy way out.

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3 Comments

the_skyler7mo ago

You just wasted your own time for nothing.

5

kaid457mo ago

Call it wasted time, but fixing things right matters to me.

2

paul_patel407mo ago

Old tech like that can sometimes hang on for years without any real problems. I get wanting to do the right thing, but an hour of your own time is a big deal when you're not getting paid for it. If the signal was working fine, maybe those connectors had more life left than you thought. The customer probably wouldn't have noticed either way until it actually failed. But I guess doing extra work just feels better sometimes, even if it's not strictly needed.

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