Another of my rants ..this time DirecTV

[Tim Morton]

I just spent the entire day dealing with DirecTV. I had a scheduled window of 8am-12pm for a new install. At 8:08am this moring i get a call from the installer proudly letting me know he would be here around noon. This was not totally unexpected, and is why i scheduled my appt monday morning at 8am. Around 1:30pm he arrrives reaking of cigarettes ( a personal pet peave of mine). He walks around and determines that the roof will not work, but he will put the disk on a pole and bury the cable for me. I said fine and told him that the pole would need to be back far enough in the woods so as not to upset the gardener in the family. He said fine and prodeded to put the pole right on the edge of my yard:rolleyes:

I corrected him and he moved it back 25 feet and i helped him clear some small branches to give him a signal..i won't bore you with the rest of the install...but it pretty much went with me following behind him and stearing him into making good choices..i am so sick of having people do crappy work...why is it my job to supervise him?????:mad::mad:

FF about 2 hours and he has everythign pretty much hooked up and booting up the satelite...about this time he is getting calls from his boss asking him to move it along to the next stop...and i have yet to see a picture.:mad::mad::mad::mad:

The picture came on and he was trying to set it up and still getting calls to leave....so i am not pleased with this and the picture looks like crap...and he has NO clue how to get it off 480i...but he had to leave....and i was like get out of here i will take this up with directTV...and i am NOT going to sign anything....

So a supervisor is supposed to now show up within 48hours....

why does it have to be so hard to get anyone to do anything correct....or am i just turning into my father ....either way i am not happy.

Off to try and see if i can't finish the install before the game comes on...is it me or does DirecTV have such a huge amount of compression that makes type appear as complete crap....like downloading web content and trying to print it...


sorry for the rant....no replies are needed...i just needed to vent.

[Mitchell Andrus]

Me too. That's why I'll let stuff sit undone until I know I can do it myself.

I own a 20,000sf comm'l building and let me tell you... I'm getting pretty good at wiring, roofing, concrete, window replacing....

Most times I get the job finished before I can get someone out to give me an estimate.

[Joe Pelonio]

Don't feel too bad, Tim. This weekend the 2nd DVR was out, it no longer showed up on the menu (Comcast). That one has a slingbox so my daughter in Italy can watch U.S. TV. So, I went online to Comcast and they had a tech support number listed with the "Call 24/7" but when I called the recording said they were closed until Monday!" :mad:

BTW many of the satellite and cable installers are not employees, but independent contractors, so a complaint might actually help.

[Jim Becker]

Unfortunately, the installers are contractors, so sometimes you don't get the "best of the best". I was fortunate, that my installer last year (about a year ago when I gave Comcast the heave-ho) was prompt, skilled, neat and clean. He even had paper overalls to deal with a surprise splitter in the crawlspace.

Sorry you had such an unpleasant experience and I hope it's straightened out quickly. DTV's HD is pretty darn good...miles and miles better than Comcast's over compressed signal.

[Bruce Page]

Hey Pop, sorry you had a bad day. :D

[Matt Meiser]

I think our picture is really good but it probably depends on the channel. Are you sure its in the highest res mode? Ours wasn't by default. I put it in a mode where it chooses the highest available resolution. Channel changing takes longer as it negotiates the res change, but its worth it.

[Tom Hintz]

I have had DirecTV for some time now and have ahd very good luck with the installers, in this area anyway. The initial install was on time, quick and worked fine. The second, when I upgraded to HD all around was actually earlier than expected and again went fine.
I had to call one time (they answered right away) when everything stopped working once early on and they explained the built-in reset deal, unplug it , plug it back in and it more or less fixes itself when it reboots. I think that has happened three times in about 8 years, always because of our electric that goes off and comes back on at random several times per year......another issue, not DirecTV related..

[Curt Harms]

We just had some major rework done by DirecTV. The service call took (much) longer than they anticipated. Everything was on the up & up except for leaving some cables hanging in the basement instead of stapling them up but they were under time pressure as well. I stapled the cable up and all is well. We've had DirecTV since about 1997 and are happy with them.

We had Comcast before that and what a PAIN! We had more outages on sunny days than we have with DirecTV during storms. As far as picture quality, it'd be pretty hard to beat Discovery's HD theatre on a good 46" Sony LCD.

Curt

[Tim Morton]

Thanks for all the encouragement...its another day and i am feeling much better. I plan on going down to the basement and doing the rewire to at least get the wires all on the same side of the main carry beam. Then i will clean up the mess and start digging into the programing. I ordered the choice plus with HD and DVR, and i thought that was enough....but none of the HD channels i tried to watch yesterday were "subscribed"...so i guess i am going to have to upgrade my package while i'm at it.

I will wait for the call from the DTV supervisor....something tells me it will be from the same contract company that was out yesterday.

[Jim Kountz]

Wow Tim your post brings back some horrible memories for me. Way back when Primestar first came out (remember them?) I thought it would be a neat way to keep some of my guys busy so I became a contracted installer for them. I did about 50 installs myself one summer and then handed it over to my top guy who was pretty good with wiring and the needed skills one should have with this type of thing.

The absolute worst thing in the world was the customer who thought they knew how to install the system better. The one who couldnt understand for the life of them WHY the dish had to go where it did and why we couldnt just simply "stick it over there". Or the one who's TV was a total piece of crap and then asked why the picture was so bad. I had one guy with a black and white TV and the man was beside himself because the Primestar signal was not in color!!
So while Im sorry to hear about your adventures, clearly you got a bad installer I can tell you that not all of them are like that at all and more times than not the problem is with the customers inability to comprehend. Not saying thats you now, it sounds like you were in the right according to your post but it does happen. ALOT!!

[Tim Morton]

I know part of it is my wanting it to be right...but i just went down to check his wiring, and found out that he never even grounded the splitter. He just took the pigtail from the RG-6 to the splitter screw. I'm pretty sure that needs to get grounded back to the house ground??? But at least now both wires are running on the same side of the carry beam, and i can tuck the splitter up inside the joists.

Looking back this entire install went off the tracks when the "boss" kept calling the installer on his cell phone and he was talking on speaker so i could hear him. He had 2 more calls to make and it was 3:30...at that point i should have asked to speak to his boss...hindsight is 20/20.

Obviously i need to get someone back out here to finish the install.

As for the dish location...i was completely fine with the location he selected...i just needed him to move back 20 feet to get it out of my front lawn, and i know i will need to keep the area clear of branches.

[Benjamin Dahl]

tim, before you upgrade, make sure you have it set up to get the picture. if it is only on 480i I think that could be part of the problem. could also be that if the set-up was not completed the HD step was missed. I had to do a little fiddling but get a good picture now and think I have the same package.
not sure what shows you are trying to get but since you have the HD package I think you should get most of them, maybe 9 or 10 more with the next step up.
Ben

[Burt Alcantara]

I think all of these type of problems are regional. We have DirectTV and have never had a problem of any kind. We had Dish Network and only had problems but not with the installers, just the company itself.

Similarly, we contracted for QWest internet services, at that time, 1.5 Mbps. Service went down weekly. QWest was never able to fix it. Finally, one of the service guys told us we could never get anything faster then 200 kbps because we were too far from the switch. QWest knew this but chose to deceive us. We were scammed by QWest for over a year. Had not the local service rep told us this we would have limped along much longer.

As it turned out, I wrote a scathing letter to QWest accusing them of fraud, misrepresentation, contractural failure and blah, blah, blah. They sent a refund check for $67 and washed their hands. Caveat emptor, etc.

All of our local contractors for any type of service have been nothing less then exemplary. Guess that's one of the reasons why we love it here.

Burt

[Chris Padilla]

We have Dish Network (after dumping Comcast's crappy cable although I must admit that their cable modem service for internet has be EXCELLENT) and couldn't be happier. We had some issues with our first DVR that finally on the 4th service call they admitted the box was the issue and gave me a new one...that had the same issues. They they finally admitted that the particular DVR model just wasn't that good so they upgraded us for free to a much nicer larger capacity box...and now we have two DVRs in the house and things have been fine now for a couple of years.

You do need to make sure to get your TV set to at least 720p or 1080i. Anything less and the picture will look terrible. I have to say, Blu Ray on 1080p is simply amazing...just amazing....