Sooooooo…I discovered that my DirecTV which has been flaking out a bit of late has decided it doesn’t want to serve up HD channels and it’s missed a couple of recordings it shouldn’t have. Not terribly surprisingly, I saw the 771 error message and the diagnostics say that the dish is mis-aligned which means “send human to sort this out straightaway!”
Then begins the fun of calling for service to a call centre where clearly the langue préférée is not English. Oh, joy.
First representative goes through the usual dum-dum questions even though I’ve made it clear that I’ve already done all the troubleshooting she can. Then she offers to send the human for a one-time screwing or the “better value” of a monthly recurring screwing.
Mind you, that’s for a service where I’ve already been stiffed with an $8/mo increase with no appreciable increase in the quality of said service (if anything, it’s decidedly worse since nickel-and-dimers par excellence AT&T bought them!). Hence, me telling her I’d prefer option C which is DirecTV send the tech on their own dime.
Of course, best she can do is half off the one-time screwing (not interested) and then she’s off to her supervisor to see what may be done.
Whilst they’re communing, I’m checking the incumbent internet provider’s website to see if there’s any promos on offer should I decide to tell DirecTV I’ve had enough and take a walk. Not that I had high hopes for that considering that they were already painful to deal with at the best of times when they were Time-Warner…their recent incarnation as Spectrum (or as one breathtakingly honest meme put it, RECTUM!) and their marriage to Charter Communications is truly terrifying. And true to form, their website wanted my address and then either a) froze or b) finally gave up and said go call their humans. Even trying to find the specifications of their internet and TV services was completely hopeless on THEIR OWN SITE!
DirecTV supervisor comes on and she’s even worse than the first one and wants to ask the dum-dum questions again. She didn’t exactly have a good answer when I asked her why she didn’t ask the first rep for all this information and then she starts in about the “for my security” bit which I already know is completely bogus. “For my security” = “shut up and comply because my computer system and processes are complete dog’s bollocks!”
Finally, second person’s supervisor finally comes to her rescue and whilst he seems more conversant with English, I’m not so sure about the comprehension. How you can translate “there is no way to fix the problem without a tech coming round” to “I didn’t want a tech at all” when their own troubleshooting says it is a problem that can’t be fixed remotely is beyond my comprehension.
But even he jumped on the “for your security” bit when he wanted the same information I’d given the previous two people but then added the twist of “so we make a PIN code that can bypass the security system”.
In. The. Same. Sentence.
I was so exasperated after 45 minutes of this silliness that I gave up and told him to just pick a PIN thinking that if I ever have to call again, it’s to cancel service and the PIN will be irrelevant. But at least he helpfully suggested I could write down his choice of PIN number which was so silly that I don’t think I have to even if I do develop mad cow disease and frankly it is shocking their system actually accepted it!
I’ll give him credit that he at least figured out the “DirecTV can pay for this farce” part and the appointment is set for tomorrow so at least that worked.
But what was truly hilarious in all of this was that the their competitor was even more hopelessly incompetent in terms of IT and a web-facing sales portal that ultimately kept me from telling DirecTV to take a hike! BTW, Google Fibre…you can’t get out to my neighbourhood quickly enough….PLEASE!!!!!