DirecTV has absolutely NO shame

beat_truck

Addicted Member
They will lie like a sack of shit to a senior citizen just to milk as much money from them as they possibly can.:mad:

I live with my mom because I am currently unable to work. I try to help her out as best I can.

A short while ago, the DTV bill went up $7 a month, and we decided to look at it to see what we could eliminate to get the price down. The new charge ended up being some BS "Regional Sports Fee".:rolleyes: Also, one of our receivers has been flaking out on certain channels. We really don't need 3 boxes for the two of us, so instead of having them replace it, we decided to ditch it and save $7 a month.

She got them on the phone and told them to deactivate that box. They first told her that it was the main receiver (which it wasn't, and they are all exactly the same anyhow), and shutting it off would somehow magically cause the other boxes to quit working. :bs:

They went 'round and 'round for a few minutes and then put her on hold. I told her they were feeding her a line of shit. She told them more sternly to shut it off. They said that it couldn't be done, without her losing service completely. At this point, she told them to have at it, shut 'er down completely. They changed their tune, and said uhh it might cause service to not work. She said DO IT, NOW. They finally did what she told them.

Then she brought up the extra BS sports charge, and told them that nobody in the house watches sports. She flat out told them to take it off her bill, NOW. They said it might do this, it might do that.:blah: It didn't do jack shit to any of the channels we care about.

Assholes.

If OTA TV wasn't so hard to receive because of distance and terrain, we would have ditched DTV years ago. We are talking about moving soon, to somewhere where OTA is a better option and internet service should be faster. I can't wait to be able to tell them to take their overpriced, garbage programming and shove it.:bye:
 
They will lie like a sack of shit to a senior citizen just to milk as much money from them as they possibly can.:mad:

I live with my mom because I am currently unable to work. I try to help her out as best I can.

A short while ago, the DTV bill went up $7 a month, and we decided to look at it to see what we could eliminate to get the price down. The new charge ended up being some BS "Regional Sports Fee".:rolleyes: Also, one of our receivers has been flaking out on certain channels. We really don't need 3 boxes for the two of us, so instead of having them replace it, we decided to ditch it and save $7 a month.

She got them on the phone and told them to deactivate that box. They first told her that it was the main receiver (which it wasn't, and they are all exactly the same anyhow), and shutting it off would somehow magically cause the other boxes to quit working. :bs:

They went 'round and 'round for a few minutes and then put her on hold. I told her they were feeding her a line of shit. She told them more sternly to shut it off. They said that it couldn't be done, without her losing service completely. At this point, she told them to have at it, shut 'er down completely. They changed their tune, and said uhh it might cause service to not work. She said DO IT, NOW. They finally did what she told them.

Then she brought up the extra BS sports charge, and told them that nobody in the house watches sports. She flat out told them to take it off her bill, NOW. They said it might do this, it might do that.:blah: It didn't do jack shit to any of the channels we care about.

Assholes.

If OTA TV wasn't so hard to receive because of distance and terrain, we would have ditched DTV years ago. We are talking about moving soon, to somewhere where OTA is a better option and internet service should be faster. I can't wait to be able to tell them to take their overpriced, garbage programming and shove it.:bye:
They are thieves without scruples, I would turn my tv off before ever giving them another cent of my money. None are great, but they just take it to another level of shit.
 
Another bonus of OTA is that the picture is better than any 'service' you can pay for.
Uncompressed. It was actually a factor when I moved, though I don't watch TV!

I recommend music
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The entire concept of paying for anything on TV is foreign to me. If we ever lose our FTA (free to air) stations in this country, I'll just watch my DVDs until I'm done and then throw the TV out in the street.

Life's too short to be held ransom to the idiot box.

Good on your Mom for ripping into those B#$tards..
 
Its not just senior citizens, they will rip everyone off they can. They know they have us by the *#$^s and if we want tv we will pay.
The assholes just raised my bill to $190/month and thats just for tv & internet .. i have ZERO pay channels, i have HD package, 1 reg hd box and 1 hdvr box
I call and tell them "CANCEL MY SERVICE" and get a response "oh wait, you've been a good customer of ours since ..." and then i get "how would you like free HBO and Showtime for 6-months" ... NO i want my bill lowered i say. Then i get the "oh hold on, you are eligible for some 12-month promotions and that is why your bill went up cause your promos expired" .... long story short i get $30/month taken off my bill via 12-month promos. The stupid bull$hit they pull .. i am really about to tell them to stick it, i hardly watch tv and when i do half the time there is not anything worth watching
 
They called my 88 year old mother who uses Spectrum, acting as Spectrum (caller id said Spectrum and id # called Spectrum), told her they were going to lower her bill trying to trick her into switching. Scum. Luckily my sister was there and between them they figured out what was going on.

I cut the tv cord long ago.
 
I had a girlfriend who ran some very large call centres and they put their absolute best negotiators on the account/service cancellation lines.

If you ever want anything done, you ring up and say 'put me through to disconnections' or 'I want to cancel my service' regardless of what you actually need. You'll get the people who can actually fix your problem. They give them a huge amount of leeway to do deals to keep you. I mean, some crazy chit to keep customers. You can say, 'give me six months free in advance and I'll stay or else just switch it off now' etc.

I got a power bill deferred for a whole year once with that tactic.
 
Mom watches TV the most and always has it on as background noise. If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't have it. I would never spend $100+ per month on it.

Except for a movie now and then on TCM and a couple shows that I could do without or get OTA, I don't watch it much at all. I have plenty of DVD and VHS movies, and between free movies on Youtube and Dailymotion and maybe getting Netflix in the future, I would be more than satisfied.

DirecTV was $115 per month for no HD, no DVR, no pay channels. Nothing. Now it should be right at $100. I suppose we can live with that for now, considering the channel package to get what we want is $94 alone.

Verizon Phone/DSL internet was $125 per month. I just had a look at that bill, and they were charging $13.50 per month for inside the house phone line and jack maintenance. Which, by the way, they never asked her if she wanted. I went online and had that nonsense removed.
 
I know EXACTLY where your coming from sir and have had the same problem with cable, a company I appropriately named "SuddenStink" because of it.
I had a package deal with phone, TV and Internet and was told it be $123 a month period, and each month it go up about $5. I called
them and argued the point several times till it came down. Then it went up every month $1 and they told me it was tax. I never had this problem with the old cable company
nor did I have the outages that this new company gave me. Half the time the phone was out and the other half the internet was down or the TV. Not to mention when I moved they tried to charge me for a whole month I wasn't even there, when I had told them 2 weeks before I moved to shut it off the day before I moved.
It's all about money and customers are treated like we're all a bunch of moron's without a clue.
I reckon it's just the sign of the times because a lot employers nowadays treat there employees the same.
I remember a time when you could trust your employer and even like him and want to go to work. America's Greed is getting way out of hand.
 
My dad has DirectTV satellite service and has similar customer service issues. Cable companies are no better. I was a cable customer for over 11 years with the same company. They kept increasing my rates all the while offering new customers much better prices. I have called several times complaining about the cost differential after I have been such a devoted long-time customer. Well, as of next Saturday I'm cutting the cord. My Dad and I are both switching over to streaming service + internet.No more cable or satellite. I ordered AT&T internet and signed up for a streaming service for the channels I currently get on cable. I will have faster internet, the same channels and no contract for $85/month total. I really believe cable and satellite are on the way out.
 
My dad has DirectTV satellite service and has similar customer service issues. Cable companies are no better. I was a cable customer for over 11 years with the same company. They kept increasing my rates all the while offering new customers much better prices. I have called several times complaining about the cost differential after I have been such a devoted long-time customer. Well, as of next Saturday I'm cutting the cord. My Dad and I are both switching over to streaming service + internet.No more cable or satellite. I ordered AT&T internet and signed up for a streaming service for the channels I currently get on cable. I will have faster internet, the same channels and no contract for $85/month total. I really believe cable and satellite are on the way out.

I hope you like AT&T, I've not heard good things about them either sir. There so called High Speed internet is like dial up I heard and there not too shy to try and cheat ya either.
I was getting 50mb on cable and I heard they are much less then that. But, good luck, hope you do better with them.
 
I really believe cable and satellite are on the way out.
I was just saying that the other day. Good riddance.

I was at a friend's house working on his vehicle, and I wondered why there were so many different dishes on the house. He said that his grandmother kept switching providers. When the new customer discount expired and they jacked the price way up, she would cancel the service and go with another one for a while until they did the same thing.:rflmao:
 
It's been YEARS, actually. I think Hell would freeze over before we'd ever get money back from a utility company.

Funny you should say Utility company, I had similar problems with my dadburn gas company, charging for a month I wasn't there after moving. And before that I had called a month
in advance to setup a shut off date and they came out the next week to shut my dadburn gas off in the middle on winter. Thankfully the service guy had brains and noticed I hadn't moved
and didn't shut it off. I swear, they must think us idiots or something or is it there just idiots?
 
Heck, Comcast's reputation became so bad they rebranded themselves--as "Xfinity". Still crappy apparently.

Verizon FIOS will play hardball--they stuck me with a price rise and even let me cancel before they blinked. I didn't mind because my T-Mobile 4G is just as fast as FIOS. After a few months Verizon made me a good offer again. They haven't raised their price again even after two years.
 
Funny you should say Utility company, I had similar problems with my dadburn gas company, charging for a month I wasn't there after moving. And before that I had called a month
in advance to setup a shut off date and they came out the next week to shut my dadburn gas off in the middle on winter. Thankfully the service guy had brains and noticed I hadn't moved
and didn't shut it off. I swear, they must think us idiots or something or is it there just idiots?
The electric company is the only one around here that you can actually depend on.

A tree took down our power and phone lines. The power company had a whole new line run and the power back on within 18 hours. Verizon told us they were going to dick around for almost three weeks. The line was laying across the street and still active. I drug it across the road, tied it up, and spliced it into the box until they finally showed up. The tech wasn't happy, but too damn bad. I'm sure he'd like to be without phone and internet for almost three weeks. Even though it was run over by several cars before it was drug off the road, they still didn't actually replace the line like I told them to.:mad:
 
I hope you like AT&T, I've not heard good things about them either sir. There so called High Speed internet is like dial up I heard and there not too shy to try and cheat ya either.
I was getting 50mb on cable and I heard they are much less then that. But, good luck, hope you do better with them.

AT&T installed a new all fiber network in my neighborhood a couple of years ago. It's supposed to be 1Gb. My neighbor loves it. I have high hopes. We'll see though...
 
He said that his grandmother kept switching providers. When the new customer discount expired and they jacked the price way up, she would cancel the service and go with another one for a while until they did the same thing.

I remember everyone doing that back in the 80's with long distance phone service--new long distance bill from a different provider every year.
 
The "package deals" are the real scam. To get that one last channel or feature that you really want, you have to move to the "next tier" (at a substantially higher rate), and get stuck with a bunch of sh*t that you don't want/need, or do without.

For a period of time, my one neighbor had his son, DIL and grand-daughter living with him while their new/old house was under renovation. His son signed them up for one of the "promotional" packages from Verizon with home phone, cable and internet on a two-year agreement (at a great discounted rate). Upon the extended family moving out into their own home, my neighbor wanted to ditch the internet, since he doesn't even own a computer (and never will) to save a few bucks per/mo. Called Verizon to make the change just to find out that there would be an "early termination fee" to get out of the contract, and that his bill for just TV and phone would be substantially higher than keeping (and not using) the internet service--his cost for services would default to "current market rates"--and who determines that???--THEY DO!--TOTAL BS.
 
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