Sooooo, a few months back we buy a DVR from Best Buy. It’s the DirecTV DVR brand and not my nifty neato TiVo one from Hughes that I love. The fast forward button sucks and I spend more time rewinding than I do FFing through the commercials. If the show is a rerun, I can’t just push one skip button to get to the “do you want to delete?” function and the ONLY way to get to the “DYWTD?” part is to fast forward to the end (which half the time does not even work).
So, skip to last week…. I get one identical to my Hughes one from Ebay and cancel the other one and all is fine. I figure I did not want to waste the old one, so I give it to our friends. Well, tonight they try to activate and DirecTV says it is leased….? WTH, I bought it, I have the receipt, I did not sign a lease, I OWN it!
So I call DirecTV and speak to some woman who speaks English only half the time and she does a crappy job explaining anything… she did not even know what “an Ebay is”. I get pissed with her attitude and tell Bobby that I should call my dad and see how the law relates to this (he is a lawyer) and she says “Call Best Buy, call your legal team, You can call ANYONE you WANT!” so I ask to speak to the manager… what a shocker, she hangs up on me.
So I call back, determined to request the manager from the getgo. After fussing with the stupid automated system which apparently does not understand “Customer Service” or “operator”, I get another woman who barely speaks English, but is nice. I explain I wanted to speak to a manager, and had a bad experience last time and she types some stuff and immediately transfers me to a manager (wow, a call from USA to India, gets transferred BACK to the United States… THAT must save them a bundle)
Anyways, apparently back in March ’06 they made all their DVRs in the stores leased, but did not put it on the box, in the manual, on the shelf displays or anywhere else…and if I do not return it in 7 days to DirecTV I get a $200 charge. So, when I purchased the DVR Best Buy should have told me it was leased. When I activated it, DirecTV should have told me it was leased. When I deactivated it they should have told me it was leased and sent a box for me to return it in. When I called them a SECOND time to deactivate it again because they never did the first time they should have told me and sent a box, and they didn’t. In fact I was being slated to get the lovely $200 charge. F’in lovely!
So the manager did feel my pain and ended up crediting $50 to my account (half the price of the DVR) and my kids now know the valuable lesson that when Mommy calls DirecTV to cover their ears unless they want to learn new words. This whole experience has put a sour taste in my mouth for DirecTV… too bad the alternatives (Dish, cable, etc) suck even more. Thankfully I DO outright own my two DVRs, the one we got 2 years ago, and the one we got “from the ebay”, but my friends now don’t get to keep it.
Oh, and to top it off, my bill has been raised AGAIN, without service being added… isn’t their slogan all about them keeping their prices from going up unlike cable??? Hmmmm, can we say “false advertising” all together now?? Am I crazy to think that three $5 increases in less than 3 years is excessive? Sorry if this is as clear as mud, I am waiting for my blood pressure to regulate… can I sue DTV for my hospital bills if they make me have a heart attack?
So, learn from my mistake, if you got your DVRs from a retail store (or the company) in the last year and paid $99, you do NOT own the thing… they own you… muahahaha
*This is all just my opinion and in no way shape or form defamation of DirecTV
1 Comment | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Me, Ranting, Technical Difficulties, Technology, Television. | #
