The September/Labor Day/FiOS Transition

All of a sudden it’s Labor Day. And September 1st. Two momentous days rolled up into one. Just the very word, September, carries with it new beginnings as well as a weightier tome. And what could be a more onerous name for a holiday as ‘Labor Day’? It’s a signal that more serious days are ahead.

The heck with all that! While I absolutely love summer, it always seems to turn out being a lot of work for me. Since I work at home and haven’t had a vacation in 13 years, there are always myriad projects for the house and yard that need attending to.  With my electrical engineering college student son home for the summer, he’s the perfect person to help with all the projects.

The biggest project this summer was getting Frontier FiOS fiber optic internet installed in our house. We’ve had DSL internet for years and I, having Luddite-like tendencies, was perfectly fine with it. But aforementioned son wasn’t content with that. For the seven or so years that the FiOS lines have been in our neighborhood, I have heard nothing but continual pestering that we needed FiOS. This reached a fevered pitch this summer as my son was used to the extremely fast internet connection he had at his university.  So I finally relented. And an installation appointment was made.

At first I was thinking it might be easy, like flipping a cable switch or something. But noooooooo, FiOS is a more complicated 3-phase process that takes about a week. The first phase is for the utility companies to come and locate all the buried utilities in the yard. My yard and street were soon covered in varying shades of spray-painted lines. In the second phase, since I have underground electrical wires, contractors came and dug a path and placed the fiber optic cable line from Frontier’s fiber terminal on the street to where it terminates at my home. Since they had to uproot the grass, I now have a clear path of where they placed it. The third and final phase was the actual FiOS service installation. This involves installing a optical network terminal (ONT) on the outside of the house, and a battery backup unit (BBU) in the garage. Then an Ethernet cable was run along the side of the house from the ONT to inside, where my computer is.

In preparation, my son and I embarked on a massive yard and house clean up. Not knowing exactly where they would be digging the lines outside, we cut down shrubs, pulled ivy and blackberry vines, pruned trees, weed-whacked, and mowed grass.  We cleaned out the garage to find a buried electrical outlet for the BBU. We also cleaned under my computer desk where there was a great accumulation of unneeded cable wires, and a mountain of dust. Nothing like the thought of an installer coming into my house to propel me to clean!

All’s well that ends well. FiOS is now installed and it works perfectly. All the workers involved were professional and efficient. Adam, the final installer, was especially polite and skillful. He did cast a subtle wary glance at the mountain of vintage clothing and collectible items that I have stored in the computer room, but didn’t say a word. And I didn’t offer any explanation. Some things are just meant to let be. 🙂

~Marilyn