Honestly, yesterday morning started pretty normal. I didn’t have a SBDC client appointment until noon, Dan was heading out to clean off malware on his Mom’s computer and then take her shopping. As a former financial advisor, I like to watch CNBC and had just turned on the TV to see the market falling due to the coronavirus concerns. And then switched over to the update on the impeachment trial.

Then the door bell rings, Elly, our 13 month old puppy, goes wild and hanging onto her I open the door to a cable company guy. He says ” we are trouble shooting radio frequency interference in the neighborhood and it is coming from your house”. Huhh? I quickly realized Dan was about to back out of the garage and I had no clue what to respond. So I told the guy to wait, caught Dan as he was getting into his truck and connected the two of them. Then a second cable guy comes into the garage. Dan says, “the previous cable company installed an amplifier in the attic, maybe you should look at that”. Then he heads off, leaving me – Ms. if the technology is broke I can’t fix it – to deal with the situation. So I get the one guy to the outside of the house, where he has some kind of box that can trace the signals, and then get the other guy to put up our ladder in the garage to climb into the attic. I ask the second guy why they are at our house and he said neighbors for some time were reporting trouble with their cable service. Then I back the car out. Did I mention I am in an old pink fuzzy bathrobe and looking like I rolled out of bed?

I get Elly quieted down and just as I go to get dressed the door bell rings again . I go the front door, no one was there. I go to the back door and ask the other cable guy, “Did you ring the door bell?” and he stares at me. So then I open the door to the garage and a voice from the attic says “someone is on your roof”. I go out to look and see no one. Then I go to the back yard and hear, Hi Laurie. Turns out it was the roofing company rep and city inspector. Ah, finally after 6 weeks, the building inspection on the hail damaged roof replacement was getting done.

Once again Elly is going crazy as I resorted to hauling her around on her lease so she didn’t run away (which she does when a door opens to the outside world). Well the roof guys get done, and they ask me what are these cable guys doing here. Oh, by the way – the cable trucks were parked in the alley, kind of hard to see from our front door and the roofing and city trucks were behind giant blue spruce in our yard, adding to my confusion with these 4 guys showing up.

So in my response to the roof guys, “well you know those drones that have been seen over the hospital nearby….” The look on their faces was priceless. Then I said, “not really”. Dear reader, if you are wondering what this drone deal is, unidentified drones have been spotted all over NE Colorado for many weeks, and everyone from feds to law enforcement to renewable energy companies saying “not us” and conducting an investigation. And local citizenry thinking it is a secret military training op.

So just then the cable guys come back into the house. And ask me to turn on various TV’s with the cable boxes and cable cards. Nothing works. The one guy comes into Dan’s office and sees all the monitors and has already seen all the servers, backup power and other devices in a room by the garage. He keeps asking what else are you running that could cause interference and somehow doesn’t believe me when I say nothing. So I can’t help myself now and tease him with, “you know Dan used to do military contract and computer security work”. Once again, I got a look … These drone sightings are the talk of the town as people look for where the possible controller units are located in a mobile van or elsewhere. So I ask what happened with the amplifier and he goes back up in the attic. An hour later both guys are back in the house with the device and bunch of cords saying this seems to have been the problem. Apparently inconsistent radio frequencies were coming from that device. Or were they?

And then as those guys leave, I catch up with a few more significant news items of the day including stock market drop about 2% and the no vote on impeachment trial witnesses. Raced to take a shower, dress and got to my noon meeting with clients planning to start a pretty awesome new business. Just another typical day at the Jones’ home. Or as we like to call it, The Jones Effect.