Coaxial-Nightmare

When we moved into our house in 2006, the Comcast guy that came to activate our service told me that our downstairs connection had been cut during remodeling.  So having done a significant amount of electric work in the past month, I decided to try my hand at fixing our house's cable problem.  It has always worked fine upstairs, but the downstairs TV has done nothing more than serve as a blank screen/DVD player for guests.  Many times we've had company ask if they could watch TV when they were over and I've always felt weird about saying that the only reason we didn't have TV downstairs is because I hadn't bothered to figure out the problem yet.  After touching the disconnected ends together, we got a signal, albeit weak and extremely fuzzy.  There were also several places in the cable where rough edges had worn down the sheathing, causing multiple weak spots in the wire.  In addition, whoever wired the cable in the first place wedged it in-between the TV shelf and the wall, meaning that there was no way to pull myself more slack from outside the house.  So I had to cut the wire from the inside, and pulled it out of the wall.  After about two hours fumbling around and trying to find where the inside hole and the outside hole met up, i realized that the old cable had been going through at an angle (which probably accounted for the torn up wire).  I stuck a skewer through the inside hole and taped the cable to it from the outside and pulled it back through the new hole, but that resulted in a cut end on the inside that I can't connect to my TV.  One co-ax screw on cap later ($10 at Best Buy) and the "impossible" cable job that Comcast wouldn't touch is up and running.  And that, my non-existent readers, is what I call some fine African-American engineering.