Time Warner's cable guys "assigned to the highest-end 'Signature Home' jobs will be getting a more 'fashion-forward look' soon."

And Verizon's recent ads "highlighted its technicians’ dress shirts"  and "characterize the install as a white glove experience."

That's from a NYT article — promoted top and center on its front webpage — called "Today’s Cable Guy, Upgraded and Better-Dressed." The photo at the link shows a clean-shaven, crewcut cable guy — with white paper booties over his shoes to protect the gleaming hardwood floor — demonstrating how to use the TV to a woman standing by her side. There's a second photo of another cable guy — also in booties. He's the bearded type. This better class of men will come to your house and help you set up the company's elaborate "suite of products."

"My genius husband had the router in the basement," joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters...

Now — it's been obvious to me for quite a while — the New York Times is written for women. But at what point does it actually become... ridiculous...

[Selene Tovar, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three] needed the Internet service at her three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood to be fast enough to power the family’s six televisions, five Xboxes, several PlayStations and multiple iPads and laptops. Even a new scale — a Hanukkah present from her husband — required a fast connection so it could send daily weigh-ins to an iPhone app.

Note the clueless husband: thinks a scale is a nice gift. Coming to Ms. Tovar's aid was Quirino Madia who "wore a white button-down shirt and gray slacks."

But watch out, affluent ladies of New York, "many cable technicians still wear the standard work clothes and tool belts."

***

And I'm sure it's got nothing to do with anything the New York Times would ever have intended to allude to, but reading that article made me want to Google "cable guy pornography," just to see how prevalent that genre was. I don't know. That's just the direction my mind went. Not that I clicked on any of the links. I didn't. And my Google search only retrieved about 4 million hits, so maybe it's not such a big porn sub-genre. I don't know if the new "fashion-forward look" will heat up the sub-genre or not. Actually, I think not. But I'm no porn connoisseur. I'm more of a Google-search connoisseur. For example, I moved on to the search: "fashion-forward cable guy porn" — 192,000 results — and found "James Franco Porn Documentary: Disappointing Sex Tape Inspires Film," an article in HuffPo (the San Francisco edition). Speaking of disappointing! James Franco does not appear as a fashion-forward cable guy in any porn film. Apparently, one time Franco made a home video with his girlfriend a realized: "Those people in pornos, they are great performers. They're not just doing it, they're selling it to an audience." The guy's a genius!

***

Rereading this post, I suddenly see what the real porn is for the ladies who read the New York Times: "three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood."