directv madness
I'm involved in a little debate with DirectTV that blows my mind.
If anything could perfectly illustrate what a 3-ring binder does to the human mind, this is it.
I received a DirectTV bill this month for over $600. That seemed a little off, I get my porn on the internet, I don't need pay-per-view.
Turns out, I bought an HD Tivo off ebay a few months back because DirecTV doesn't offer Tivos anymore, they only offer their own brand of DVR, and everyone says they're terrible. So I said screw it, bought an old HD Tivo off ebay, and plugged it in. All is well.
Except DirecTV said "Tobin has an HD DVR. He must have gotten it from us," and decided to bill me for it.
The conversations I've had with the call reps have been mind boggling, Brazil-like material.
"We're showing that you have an unreturned DVR from January 10th"
"Is that the HR 10-250?"
"Yes."
"Do you realize that DirecTV hasn't offered that model for sale for well over a year?"
"Well, I'm showing that we sent you a HD DVR and billed you for it."
"You're showing that you sent me a DVR that you don't sell? I bought that on Ebay. You've made a mistake. You don't sell that DVR."
"But we're showing that you have an unreturned DVR here, sir."
Cue sound of my head exploding.
You'd think that any human being with 10 functioning brain cells would realize that when I'm being billed for a product that isn't for sale from their company, a mistake has been made. I've escalated it up and am awaiting a call back, when I get to repeat this discussion all over again.
EDIT:
Three weeks after this posting, DirecTV actually turned my service off, after promising to call me back with a resolution expert. I called up and asked them why I wasn't called back to resolve the false charge, and went through the whole argument all over again. An hour and three people later, I finally got someone who was willing to remove the charge, and I got my service turned back on. So I ended up losing about three hours of my life to this stupid problem.
A lot of you seem to have found me suddenly on the net, I got a slew of comments today on a post that's a month old, and most of you seem to think that the Tivo was stolen. I'm not sure why you would think that, and DirecTV didn't think so either. This was simply a systematic fuckup, where they automatically charge you for a Tivo when you activate it, assuming that it's theirs. This is a bad policy, and it's nearly impossible to fix, most of the employees I talked to refused to believe that I bought the Tivo, even after I explained to them that DirecTV DOES NOT SELL that model.
So yeah, it's all resolved now. The Tivo wasn't stolen, it was DirecTV's fault, and they fixed the issue after a lot of pain on my part. I wish they'd given me some sort of refund for my time, since it was their mistake, but that's obviously too much to hope for. It's a stupid and wrong minded policy to charge people for something by default without verifying that they got it from you.
posted by Tobin @ 2:59:00 PM
10 comments
