How to fix things

My dad once taught me that the best way to fix something, is to take it apart and put it back together again. The lawn mower that I used to cut our lawn had failed to start, and although my dad couldn't say exactly what was wrong with it, we started to fix the problem by taking the mower apart. After disassembling some things, looking at them, and then putting them back together he asked me to try starting it up again. I remember being somewhat dubious thinking that.. we hadn't really fixed anything, but despite not knowing what we had fixed the lawn mower started and I was back to my mowing.

If I had only remembered this lesson, a recent problem I had with my cable would not have been an issue. My roommate and I had started getting "One moment please. This channel will be available shortly" messages from Comcast. It was very frustrating because it would only affect some channels and only at certain times during the day. I thought it must be an issue with Comcast and waited a while to see if the problem would work itself out (this is a strategy for fixing things that I use frequently, but rarely works). Weeks later, nothing had improved, so i eventually called comcast.

The first guy I talked with decided that he should send a "refresh" signal to our cable box, but that didn't solve anything. I called Comcast again and talked to someone else who said I should try checking the cable connections and plugging the cable directly into my tv (skipping the box). This seemed like a good idea, but before I even unplugged the cable from my box I checked the connection coming out of the wall. I tightened the cable about 1.5 turns and all our cable problems disappeared!