Wednesday, August 4, 2010

soapbox.

Remember that awesome new tv we won more than a month ago? Yeah, it's been sitting in the box, all cozy, until yesterday.

We were supposed to have Dish Network out today to add another box to our house and get that baby up and running. And, Dish is so nice, they gave me a four hour window to be at my house waiting on the technician.

Cut to 12 p.m. {the end of my four-hour window}. No technician, no call. Imagine my frustration.

I picked up the phone and call them at 12 on the dot. My first phone call was about 15 minutes long. After those 15 minutes, nothing had been resolved, so I hung up and called again.

Another call and 45 minutes later, I'm off the phone with a new service appointment and some of my previous frustration alleviated, but after hearing the reason for the no-show, another new-found frustration.

Here's the back story.

You already know that we won a tv. So, we were really torn as to where to put it. We have a tv in our living room, and there wasn't really any way that we could move it from it's current location {space issues and also, it's a DLP -- read: not exactly paper thin}, so the new tv was to find it's home in our bedroom. {I know, kind of a monstrous tv for a small bedroom like ours, but what were we to do?}

So, I called Dish asking about adding a second box to our house. I thought we could just tether the two HD tvs to the one HD box, and then add a second standard definition box to the 13" tv I got when I was 13 our small tv in the guest bedroom.

After somewhat of a run around, and people quoting me differnent prices, we settled on what we thought we needed for a reasonable price and set up the service appointment.

Now, here's where it gets tricky. Everytime I call Dish, I'm told that I'm a "top customer" {oooo!}, which, I found out, afforded us free HD For Life! Suhweet! All I had to do was sign up for paperless billing. Fine, no problem. So, I set up the service appointment and now we have free HD. The only issue is that I didn't sign up for it that day.

About a week later, I realized that our original service appointment wasn't going to work. I called and got it reschedule for today, between 8 and noon {so convenient...}. Then, when I hung up with Dish, I got online and signed up for HD for Life and paperless billing. Apparently {with no heads up from Dish}, this signaled to them that I no longer wanted a second box and therefore wouldn't be needing that service appointment I just rescheduled.

Cut to this morning. I get up and get ready early so that just in case they happen to come on the early end of the four-hour window {yeah...right}, I'm dressed and ready to go. Then, I waited. And waited. Aaaaaand waited.

At noon I picked up the phone and called Dish. Surprisingly, they had no service appointment scheduled for us today. Hmm. After a bit of the run around, I was transferred to Michelle in the Executive Service Department {that's right...executive}. Michelle got everything figured out and we are now set up again for a service appointment between 8 and noon tomorrow.

I realize it all worked out in the end, and the people at Dish were very understanding and apologetic. But. Yes, but, I think that I should have been either prompted or notified that by signing up for HD for Life/paperless billing that that was in effect cancelling my appointment.

{Oh, and I tried to get the technician fee waived because of the "headache I was put through" but they couldn't do it. Never hurts to ask!}

And, I'm off my soapbox. Sorry for the long, wordy post.

Has anything like this ever happened to you? Did they give you any discounts or perks because of it?

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