OK I’ll admit to being more than a little angry with the way that Bell through up our ExpressVu (now it’s simply Bell TV ) Dish on the chimney. But comments left both on this blog and in the Flickr feed have been rather supportive and tend to agree with me on the fact they balls’ed it up big time. Not only did they carry out a very poor installation in the first place, when we called them, they refused to send someone out to repair the damage without charging us. First Class service right?
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I had already missed a Habs game on Thursday night and I sure as hell was not going to miss the Saturday Night game either, what with Martin Brodeur about to equal Patrick Roy for the all time win record as a goalie. But there was one event that was even more important than the hockey game and missing this would have meant an uncertain death for Mrs Canuck and I. That’s right, if I did not get this dish fixed soon, our kids would miss Saturday Morning Cartoons and we would be called upon to entertain them on the only day of the week we both get to lie till 8 (sometimes 9, but not since Les Boys were born). Being that Thing 1 and Thing 2 are respectively 8 and 4 years of age, we can trust them to wake up when they want head downstairs, turn the Tele to 138 (TeleQuebec) and even poor themselves a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of orange juice. This 6 year intense training programme we had started when Thing 1 was so young was about to go pear shape.
However I had a back up plan and for once it paid off very nicely to have friends with Cool Tools. Yesterday after work, I grabbed Schultzter (Follow @Schultzter on Twitter) and decided to take half the 2FatDads writing staff to Home Depot and pick up supplies. A supply that we managed to get from behind the enemy lines. Our operative agent with crucial Bell knowledge, let’s call him Lineman Al, gave us a small shopping list of hardware and fasteners that apparently so dangerous that no one at Bell is allowed to use them anymore. And today, on this very blog, I am going to give you this list at the very risk of blowing his cover forever. For no father and definitely no Fat Dad should be deprived of a Saturday Morning Lie-In ever again.
THE LIST (Save it to your Remember the Milk account now!!!)
So after the hazardous goods were acquired, I made my way back to the roof top and removed the dish which was holding by one mere tapcon screw, one single screw had survived the winds because it had been drill into the brick and not into the sand. Thanks to some awesome tools that Lineman Al had bestowed upon me and the Hammer drill (already on the new RTM Tools list) that Schultzter lent me the work went super smoothly. And after another couple of hours topside and the dish was now bolted into a 3/4 inch plywood board which was now anchored into the brickwork using lag nuts and proper masonry anchors.
The result is the Missus was able to watch Super Nanny and a few hours of “What Not to Wear while watching John and Kate plus 8″, the channel formally known as TLC, I got my sleep and the Girls watched some cartoons this morning.
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