Customer Disservice

After last week's continued failures of my DVR, I contacted DirecTV using their online form. I sent this barely polite letter:

I called DirecTV technical support tonight to report yet another failure of my DirecTV HDDVR to perform as advertised (and as I pay you hundreds of dollars a year to perform). The technical support rep once again could not provide any suitable solution or reparations for the problem.

I am appalled at DirecTV's terrible customer and technical support, as well as your unethical, and quite frankly reprehensible, business practices. I cannot believe that you charge me (and many other customers) this amount of money for a service you then do not provide. In addition, I also don't even have the option to return your poor quality hardware and to choose another option, because DirecTV will charge me even for that privilege.

I cannot state strongly enough how disappointed I am with your company and its services and products. Unfortunately, such statements appear to get lost in the corporate woodwork far too often. Please pass this message along to DirecTV's management and executive team, so that they can take action to repair your company's rapidly failing reputation.

Their response:

Thank you for writing and letting us know your concern. I apologize for the inconvenience that your DIRECTV account has caused you. I have forwarded your message to a special group who would be able to make suitable resolution as to the appeasement of this concern. Do expect a specialist to call in the next few days to discuss the matter at hand.

Thanks again for writing and please stay tuned to directv.com for the latest news and information about our services.

As you can easily predict, no such phone call has been made, nor do I really expect one to be. Go DirecTV!

False sense of security

Well, it's been a while since I've posted. I was hoping this thing was finally starting to work, but of course that was just wishful thinking. I had an inkling that things were going south last week - the DVR just froze entirely while I was using it. A reset appeared to fix the problem. My old friend the funnily-stretched crop mode was also bad early last week, but I just let it go, since things were working mostly as expected. Then, yesterday, I noticed that a schedule episode of one of my 'season pass' programs was running, but not being recorded. I could see it in the 'To Do' ist, but it sure wasn't recording. The episode came and went, but the DVR made no effort to record it whatsoever. Even hours later, it was still in the 'To Do' list, long after its broadcast had passed. I didn't bother calling DirecTV since a rebroadcast was available later in the evening and I just set it up to record that particular showing. Today I came home from work to find the system happily recording my two Monday night shows. I got home from work late, so I watched an episode of seinfeld while waiting for these two programs to record. One of them is just fine - the other didn't play back at all, just a blank screen. I reset the box, hoping it would come back to me, but it's gone from the list entirely. I called DirecTV, they have no way to fix it nor any compensation to offer. After the call, I went to check the to do list, only to find that the 10-15 movies I had set to record over the next 2-3 weeks are all also gone from the list. Thanks DirecTV. Thanks for nothing.