Well everyone, I did it finally. I wasn't even thinking about it until a girl at Dish named Kiana decided to screw me on my bill.
For the last whole year Dish kept telling me I was a month behind on my bill and hence charging me late fees every single month, making the already over-priced bill even worse.
So I finally get Kiana, who speaks plain English, and ask her what the problem was. She tells me that I missed various bills here and there, this month and that month. I said I absolutely did not. She asked how I so sure?
From the experience of getting burned by a few companies who have bad bookeeping I have built a running spreadsheet over quite a few years of every bill I have ever paid. (I'm a retired engineer, I'm really anal about details and it's what I did for a living). So this is a really easy exercise for me to keep up.
So I said, "Pick a year and a month you wish to start at and I'll run through the payments I made, date, and confirmation numbers from there.
She starts at September 2014. So I answered all the payment questions, October, November, December, January 2015. "Wait Mark, you're missing a payment in there." So again I name the date, amount, confirmation and guess what? They have no record of a payment. I say, "I have YOUR confirmation number, so someone there applied it?"
In comes the run-around, "Can you tell me what card you used?"
"No I can't. I have 10 cards and half of them have been replaced for interent fraud in that time. I can't even guess at a card number that far back. It would have been a Visa, that's all I can tell you."
"Well, unless you can give me the exact card number I can't help you."
We end the call.
Not 3 hours later I get the onscreen banner saying I have to pay in 48 hours or Dish will be shut off. And it was.
So we purposely go a week without Dish in order to tell if any of us would swell up and die with no TV? Guess what? No one exploded, nobody lost their appetite, the kiddo's grades didn't drop in school. All is well.
In the meantime we went out and bought the new Tivo Bolt for $299 with the 500 gig drive and a year's fees paid. We can get about 50 channels off antenna for it and we also have 3 Roku's, one for each TV. So we are set for entertainment, let alone the hundreds of DVD's we have. And Redbox if something totally cool comes out. Better still, the Tivo has all the same functionality as the Hopper, but it's better. It has Autohop on 20 channels, which works instantly and takes you right to the first second of the show instead of half-way through the last commercial like Hopper does.
The starting and ending times for the programs are right on the money. No more shows stopping 2 minutes before they are over! And our next purchase will be $123 apiece for 2 Tivo minis (the Tivo equivalent of Joeys), then we'll have whole home DVR.
The outcome of all this?
For the cost of 2 Dish payments I got a box that will operate like the Hopper for a year. No more monthly gouging. And Dish lost a 14-year customer for $100 that they wanted to overcharge me a second time because someone there made a typo.
Bye-bye Charlie, it's been real, it's been fun...
For the last whole year Dish kept telling me I was a month behind on my bill and hence charging me late fees every single month, making the already over-priced bill even worse.
So I finally get Kiana, who speaks plain English, and ask her what the problem was. She tells me that I missed various bills here and there, this month and that month. I said I absolutely did not. She asked how I so sure?
From the experience of getting burned by a few companies who have bad bookeeping I have built a running spreadsheet over quite a few years of every bill I have ever paid. (I'm a retired engineer, I'm really anal about details and it's what I did for a living). So this is a really easy exercise for me to keep up.
So I said, "Pick a year and a month you wish to start at and I'll run through the payments I made, date, and confirmation numbers from there.
She starts at September 2014. So I answered all the payment questions, October, November, December, January 2015. "Wait Mark, you're missing a payment in there." So again I name the date, amount, confirmation and guess what? They have no record of a payment. I say, "I have YOUR confirmation number, so someone there applied it?"
In comes the run-around, "Can you tell me what card you used?"
"No I can't. I have 10 cards and half of them have been replaced for interent fraud in that time. I can't even guess at a card number that far back. It would have been a Visa, that's all I can tell you."
"Well, unless you can give me the exact card number I can't help you."
We end the call.
Not 3 hours later I get the onscreen banner saying I have to pay in 48 hours or Dish will be shut off. And it was.
So we purposely go a week without Dish in order to tell if any of us would swell up and die with no TV? Guess what? No one exploded, nobody lost their appetite, the kiddo's grades didn't drop in school. All is well.
In the meantime we went out and bought the new Tivo Bolt for $299 with the 500 gig drive and a year's fees paid. We can get about 50 channels off antenna for it and we also have 3 Roku's, one for each TV. So we are set for entertainment, let alone the hundreds of DVD's we have. And Redbox if something totally cool comes out. Better still, the Tivo has all the same functionality as the Hopper, but it's better. It has Autohop on 20 channels, which works instantly and takes you right to the first second of the show instead of half-way through the last commercial like Hopper does.
The starting and ending times for the programs are right on the money. No more shows stopping 2 minutes before they are over! And our next purchase will be $123 apiece for 2 Tivo minis (the Tivo equivalent of Joeys), then we'll have whole home DVR.
The outcome of all this?
For the cost of 2 Dish payments I got a box that will operate like the Hopper for a year. No more monthly gouging. And Dish lost a 14-year customer for $100 that they wanted to overcharge me a second time because someone there made a typo.
Bye-bye Charlie, it's been real, it's been fun...
