DIRECTV Disconsolations

When I first moved into my shop apartment, I don’t remember having TV at all for a while.  On the main rental house, where my friend Carol Shepherd was living, there was a roof antennae that I never took the trouble to tap into.  The first TV I remember having in my apartment was the one I inherited from my mother’s death in 1991.  Carol lived on my property for about 5 years, and I believe it was the next tenants (?) who wanted some sort of piped in TV. 

So, we got a Dish satellite TV account and shared it between the house and my apartment.  The distance between the two dwellings isn’t great, and it was no problem running a line over from the house.  I didn’t figure I was doing anything ‘bad’, as I viewed the situation to be like sharing an account with a room mate.  They offered 2 receivers for a nominal extra cost, so I was taking advantage of this.

Things went fine for several years, even through a couple of different tenants, but somewhere along the line Dish TV decided they wanted to consider us 2 different services and wanted twice the money.  I said ‘No thanks’ and dropped the service.

In about 2003 (I’m guessing) new tenants, Kristin and Steve, called up DirecTV and asked them to come out to talk about starting a service.  A man came out and found that there was no place on the main house to locate the dish, as it was surrounded by trees.  The nearest place to put the DirecTV dish was on my little guest house.  I told the man I would like to share the service.  I told the man about my problems with Dish TV.  I asked him if there would be any problem.  He said, “No problem at all.  I can maybe even get you an extra 100 feet of cable to make the run, but you’ll have to dig the ditch to bury it”.  Steve Gillilan, the tenant,  was standing by my side when the DirecTV installation man said this to us.  So, under these conditions we started up the service and everything ran smoothly for a year or two.

Then Steve and Kristin split up and moved out of the house.  I made some attempt to transfer their DirecTV account into my name, but there was some difficulty, so the service was dropped.  My next tenant, Andrea, who I drove back and forth to school for many years in my job as a school bus driver, didn’t care about TV very much, and I certainly didn’t, so the service was never started back up even though the equipment stayed in both dwellings.

My next door neighbors, Bill and Inga-Lisa, who had been like surrogate parents to me for the last 20 years, were getting old.  Their first daughter, Berit, decided to take an early retirement from her airline job on the East coast and move back to Sequim to look after her parents in their old age.  My rental house became available shortly after her return, so I rented her this convenient place to look in on her parents (yet be separated) whenever she wanted.

Berit and I decided to rehook up with DirecTV, so I made the call, told them that all equipment was already in place, and to please start our service.  This was an oportune time, as they were running ads on TV, over the Internet, in newspapers, and even on billboards, if I remember correctly, for basic service at $19.95 per month for at least a  year.  This is all both Berit and my family needed, and this is the service I called in to start up.

The DirecTV phone representative agreed completely to hook me up for the $19.95 per month deal with the standard charge for an extra receiver.  He took all my billing information, including my debit card numbers, and right before we were ready to conclude the deal, he said “Wait a minute.  I have to check something”.  He put me on hold for a minute or two, and when he came back he said, “Oh, I’m sorry.  You called in a day too late for the $19.95 special.  If you like, we can sign you up for the $36.95 deal for 3 months, which gives you all the movie channels for free.  After this 3 month period you can go back to the basic charge of $19.95 per month, with the charge for the extra receiver”.  Seeing ‘red’, I told him …, and I would have to think about it, and hung up.

My tenant, Berit, and I discussed this con job, agreeing on the transparency of these crooks and extortionists, but decided in the end that we could afford the extra charge for 3 months, going back to the basic service at the end of this period.  I called back to DirecTV and with the reference number given me, I started the service.

At the end of the 3-month period, I got a phone message that my 3 month ‘Special’ deal was up and that if I didn’t phone in with directions, my new bill for the same service would be $60+.  Not more than a few minutes went by when I had DirecTV back on the phone.  I told them that I wanted to stop the sex and violence that they force-funneled into my home via the free movie channels, etc., and wanted to go back to the basic service.  After some negotiations, the DirecTV phone representative told me my new service would be basic, and my new bill would be $27+ per month.  “Does this cover the charge for the extra receiver and taxes?” I asked.  “Yes”, he said.  “Are there any other hidden charges?” I asked.  “No”, he said.  “Thank you, and good-bye”, I said.

What follows in the links on the left is some of the correspondence between myself and DirecTV and their bill collection agencies.  It is not complete in detail, but it is mostly complete in gist.