Fixed.

I fixed it. The TV. And I must say, the Cox technician who messed it up was one stupid idiot. He had no reason to fuss with the hookups behind the TV, since he split the cable in the closet behind the wall--well, it's hard to explain without a diagram. Just take my word for it--he had no reason to detach any of the TV connections. But he did, and he reattached them incorrectly. He seems to have tried to get the TV working again because I discovered an extra connection he'd made with a separate length of cable. He must have known the TV wasn't working when he left, and he didn't bother to mention it.

So now I can call Cox and tell them not to send anyone out on Tuesday, because I've solved the problem. See, I just can't leave something like that alone. I'm "guy-like" in my belief that I can do these things myself. I like opening up my computer. I've swapped out fans, hard drives, memory, video cards, ethernet cards,...that's about it. It's all very simple, really. This goes here, that goes there. So when I went in the closet (actually it's now a furnace room, but whatever) with a flashlight and followed the cables to figure out where the cable had been split and what could have been messed up, there just wasn't much that could have gone wrong.

Oh, and he walked around the house for some reason, on the outside, maybe trying to find where the cable came in. The reason I know this is because he LEFT THE F*CKING GATE OPEN AND THE DOG GOT OUT. Thank god/dess Saint didn't discover the open gate until about 9am this morning. If he'd gotten out in the middle of the night I hate to think what might have happened.