So the night before thanksgiving, I’m doing some work in my office and I hear, “Dave… The TV isn’t working.” Great. The DirecTV HD DVR in my living room evidently crapped out. It locked up, and upon rebooting it I was greeted with a “ERROR 14 – Internal Storage Problem.” Several reboots later, I was on the phone with DirecTV. They ordered a replacement receiver, but could not guarantee what model I would receive. Over a year ago, I fought tooth and nail to get the HR24 receiver, because the previous models are painfully slow. I was certain that I was going to get one of the previous models, because the guy said I would be receiving a refurbished unit. Oh, and did I mention I have to pay $20 for shipping on the replacement receiver?
The order didn’t get officially entered until Friday afternoon, due to the holiday. 7 days go by…
Last night I received the replacement unit. To my surprise, it was an HR24! I was quite pleased. I immediately unboxed it and hooked it up in place of the dead unit. Upon plugging it in, I kept hearing the “bong” noise through the speakers that you normally hear when you press an invalid button on the remote. My first thought was that they had shipped me a remote and I didn’t see it in the box, and the buttons were being mashed. No remote in the box. I went through the entire activation process (muted the audio). When the programming finally came up, it started wildly cycling through the screen resolutions. So fast that my TV couldn’t keep up and I basically just saw a black screen. The resolution indicator on the front of the unit was rapidly and erratically cycling between 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p. This particular unit has a touch-sensitive front panel, so it does not have any physical “hard” buttons. For some reason, it thinks the resolution button is being pressed repeatedly. In an effort to stop it, I press the resolution “button”, and some of the other buttons on the front of the unit. No joy. It just keeps cycling through the resolutions. I thought maybe I should block the front of the unit, to make sure that it wasn’t getting some erroneous IR signal causing this to happen. The cycling continued. So again, I’m on the phone with DirecTV. This time they run me through 20 minutes of useless troubleshooting. “Try unplugging the HDMI cable from the receiver. Ok, reboot it. Ok, now try unplugging the HDMI cable from the TV.” ?! Eventually, the “tech” concludes that the replacement receiver has an internal issue. They assign me a case manager and tell me that I will be contacted within two hours. Mind you, it is 8:30pm on a Wednesday. Unsurprisingly, I don’t get a phone call that night.
This morning I got a call just after 8am from a case manager in Colorado. She asked me to explain to her, in detail, the issue and the steps I’ve taken to try to resolve it. She recommends having a technician visit my house. I tell her that I don’t want to take time off work to resolve this issue. She says that my only other option is “chance” having another receiver shipped to my house. She says that she has no way to guarantee that it will be an HR24, and that it may or may not have a similar issue. How can you run a business like this? Is there no quality control? By the tone in her voice, I could tell that she did not have a high level of confidence in the refurbished receivers that ship from their warehouse. I suspect that their quality control process consists of little more than checking to see if the lights come on when it is plugged in, and then it gets shipped out to another poor sap. There is no shipping charge for the second replacement, and I managed to get her to credit me the shipping for the first unit. Still not really compensation for not having service for what will probably wind up being 11 days (at best).
I’m amazed by how little control anyone seems to have over this process. She said the receiver should arrive in 2 days, but she couldn’t promise that the order would get processed today. It was 8:30am (6:30am her time) on a week day. If she submitted the order during the call, how could it not be processed the same day? She had no ability to choose to ship me a new receiver, vs a refurbished one. Apparently the only way you can get a new receiver is to have a tech visit your home and install it himself. What a sweet setup.
I realize it’s just TV. Big fucking deal, in the grand scheme of things. But this kind of stuff infuriates me to no end! So, DirecTV, you are on very thin ice. One more strike and I’ll be choosing an alternative content provider.
To be continued…