We have DirecTV for our television service. For the most part, I don't have many problems with it. The only annoying thing is that the satellite dishes on our roof are basically like giant sails sitting up there, and from time to time, the dishes get out of alignment by a stiff wind and need to be retuned. Meanwhile, many of our channels appear pixilated, if we can pick them up at all.
We started having a problem last week. I called and couldn't get an appointment until yesterday, which was 6 days out from my call. Annoying, but what are you gonna do, right?
Yesterday, I waited at home from 12 until 4, my alloted appointment time. As I needed to leave to pick up Zeke at around 4, it wasn't acceptable for the guy to show up at 3:59, so I called at 3 to see what the status was. The guy I talked to was a national customer service rep, so he gave me the number of the dispatching part of the company to call. I called. They were closed for the evening.
Annoying.
At 4, nobody had shown up, and I was wicked pissed, to quote my New Hampshire relatives. On my way up to the daycare, I called DirecTV again. Pity the poor slob who took the call.
He apologized for the inconvenience, offered me a $5 credit on my account, and told me that the next scheduled appointment available was next Thursday.
"I want more than $5. First of all, I'm a lawyer, and my billable rate is $200 an hour. So you just wasted $800 worth of my time. Second, I already had to wait a week with crappy service for this appointment, and now you're telling me I'm going to be out another week? That is absolutely unacceptable. I want credit for two weeks' worth of lost service."
So he upped the ante to $100. Which is about right, but still, I was going to be without decent service for another week. The season premiere of Mad Men is Sunday night. I am newly obsessed with that show (and for reals, y'all, it is, in my humble opinion, the best show I have seen in a long, long time and unquestionably the best thing on right now). Missing the premiere would not be cool. I bitched some more, but got nowhere, so said good-bye and ended the call.
Later that night, I was checking my messages, and realized I had missed a call at around 4:45. It was David, the service technician, apologizing for missing my appointment and offering to stop on his way home to take care of it. I got the message to late to call him back, so I called him this morning and he agreed to stop by this afternoon when his shift was over and fix the problem.
Nice.
So David showed up at about 1:30, all ready to work. Except that it turned out that his ladder wasn't tall enough to get up on the roof safely. My roof is very high. I told him that I certainly didn't want anyone dying simply so I could get better tv reception, so he said he was going home, but promised to call the dispatcher about getting someone with a taller ladder out to see me, hopefully within the next couple of days.
Whatever.
Then at around 3:15, David called again. He informed me he had spoken to his supervisor, got authorization to go to Home Depot and spend $350 on a new super tall ladder, and was on his way back to my house to fix my satellite dishes.
Seriously? Who gets this kind of star treatment from the cable company??
But sure enough, he is up on the roof as I type this.
I keep looking out the window to make sure he's safely up there, and also to check for flying pigs and cats chasing dogs.
i wish verizon would do this for me. but instead, i have to wait on hold for 45 minutes, get jockeyed around from one department to the next, and spend a total of two hours on the phone to get someone to cancel part of our service package. I think these companies get together and agree to make our lives miserable.
ReplyDelete