Shocking the Cable Guy

Working at a startup certainly provides fun stories to tell. We had an amusing interaction today. As back story, we are in “Release Mode” at work and thus things run more strangely than normal.

A Comcast technician finally came out to investigate why our 1 week old cable internet was so flaky. On a side note they concluded it was because of “all the statics” I had configured in the router. I have absolutely no idea what he was talking about (I had no custom settings other than a DMZ host) but when he left our speed was back up so whatever. He swapped a chunk of coax and reset the router to factory settings and I am inclined to crediting those actions for the fix instead.

In any case, when he arrived at our office (with 2 technicians in training behind him) they saw the following at 2pm:

• Lights off except for display glow and some sunlight along one wall
• Hudson dots projected across a wall
• Piles of pizza boxes, cookies, and chip bags
• Beer and red bull being consumed by everybody (have to modulate the effects you see)
• Piles of wire, our custom ducts into the ceiling grid, etc.

They just stood there completely frozen for several seconds until I stood up, turned the lights on, and greeted them. I have to imagine that isn’t typically the environment they walk into

I think our office has a cool, bona fide startup vibe and we get a lot of host incubator tour stops at our door because it generally looks like stuff is getting done.