Belfair woman loses 22 trees to access the wrong satellite

[sidha]

Satellite TV mix-up costs Belfair woman 22 trees (KATU Portland)

BELFAIR, Wash. -- A local mom who ordered satellite television is upset over the price she's paying, but its not the money she's mad about.

Instead, it's a yard full of trees mistakenly chopped down that has Jenny Guse fuming. The result is a messy mistake in the middle of her rural paradise.

"I moved out here for the trees after being in the city for so many years," she said.

When ordering satellite TV for her son's rec room, Guse knew she'd lose trees in order to gain access to channels, but she never imagined she'd lose so many.

"We have 44 trees down, 22 of which didn't need to come down," said Guse. "I hate it. Just makes me sick."

Guse and her neighbor used a chainsaw to chop the trees installers marked. When the company sent out a senior technician, Guse says he couldn't believe his eyes.

"He just basically said, 'oh man, what did they do?'" she said.

Guse says the technician told her the DirecTV dish was placed on the wrong side of the deck, facing the wrong satellite.

"We didn't want a foreign language satellite and those trees did not need to come down," she said.

Red paint now marks the stumps of 22 trees that mistakenly came down, and Guse had to chop another ten to finally get a signal.

"Bottom line: I want it cleaned up and I want the trees paid for," she said.

An arborist told Guse it would cost $99,000 to transport and replace her once-tall trees. Removing the stumps and downed trees would cost $5,000.

Ironwood Communications denied the claim, stating it was Guse's decision to cut the trees in order to access a satellite signal.

"It's just deny, deny, deny," said Guse.

KOMO News called DirecTV, who said the incident occurred before their company bought Ironwood. DirecTV promised to make all reasonable efforts to resolve the situation to the customers' satisfaction.

Guse is the first to admit she loves having more channels but not at the expense of so many trees.

A state law in effect can triple the amount of damages for trees wrongly removed.

Be sure to see the photo or watch the video:
Satellite TV mix-up costs Belfair woman 22 trees | KATU.com - Portland, Oregon

[Feel free to double post this excellent story at the DN forum. I won't complain it's off-topic there too.]

 

[Anole]

Funny, but not FTA related.

Come to think of it, neither is the thread on the cable guy distributing Dish Network.
Not really FTA related, either.

 

[sidha]

I had considered prefacing my posts with an OT, but then I'd probably be an even bigger target. That's the least I will do, at the moment. Preface the title line and wear more armor. We sorely lack a fun section exclusively for humor in the big wide world of satellite TV.

-sidha

 

[Mr Tony]

moved to DirecTV forum

 

[Mr Tony]

Thats just crazy...I'd be kinda mad too if I lost that many trees...now if I did the cutrting that would be different

 

[charper1]

If this goes to court it will be frivolous IMHO. The user should have sought out another opinion or three! It was ultimately their choice to cut those trees down and to me, is one of those numerous cases where the customer did what they wanted to get what they wanted by any means necessary and will now use the media and the "poor pitiful me" excuse to try to pressure (aka extort) the deep pocket company to get some pay back; which will likely result in them passing it, along with all other claims like these throughout the fiscal year, to all the rest of us end user/subscribers.

 

[cforrest]

All she had to do was go to dishpointer.com and enter her address in. Hope she likes the openess of her property now. Amazing what some people do for TV. I am sure next time she has an issue with something she'll get a second opinion before doing anything.

 

[Zynergi]

Thats why I hand my Compass to the customer and tell them the sat locations and elevations. Then they can make a decision as to what would need to come down. The only words from my mouth are, "cant get a signal.. trees are in the way.. here look for yourself sats are from 210 to 255 from 27 at 255 up to 38 from 228 to 210 anything below those coordinates will not work."

IMO if it can be proven that the tech sited incorrectly and actually did mark the trees for removal, him and his company should be responsible. Maybe a court case such as this will help D* and E* from pressuring companies to get stuff in at all costs, in this case at least $104,000 in trade for $50 a month. I hope she does take it to court and gets some sort of loss reward for the estimated age of the trees she valued.

 

[iwc5893]

Thats why I hand my Compass to the customer and tell them the sat locations and elevations. Then they can make a decision as to what would need to come down. The only words from my mouth are, "cant get a signal.. trees are in the way.. here look for yourself sats are from 210 to 255 from 27 at 255 up to 38 from 228 to 210 anything below those coordinates will not work."

IMO if it can be proven that the tech sited incorrectly and actually did mark the trees for removal, him and his company should be responsible. Maybe a court case such as this will help D* and E* from pressuring companies to get stuff in at all costs, in this case at least $104,000 in trade for $50 a month. I hope she does take it to court and gets some sort of loss reward for the estimated age of the trees she valued.

I'm surprised this even happened around here. Almost two years ago, Ironwood came out and told us we could no longer tell customers which trees were interfering with the signal, and we certainly could not tell the customer which trees to cut down.

 

[cybok0]

All she had to do was go to dishpointer.com and enter her address in. Hope she likes the openess of her property now. Amazing what some people do for TV. I am sure next time she has an issue with something she'll get a second opinion before doing anything.

There are A lot of people who don't know how to do that. Most people rely on what the tech tells them.
I do agree with charper1 that she should of got a second opinion, but maybe she thought they would of told her the same thing.

So just because you know to go to dishpointer or use a compass to find the satellites, don't assume other people do.

Just out of curiosity, how do you know about dishpointer, did you learn about it here, somewhere else one the internet or do you install satellites? There may be a lot of traffic on this site, but not everyone that has D* or E* comes here or DBS.

 

[charper1]

Knowing about dishpointer or not is no excuse; the minute some told her to start whacking the 2nd, 3rd or more trees she should have screamed stop and got some alternate opinions .

 

[fanquon]

Ho Ho Ho, thats what the $60 per installation from Ironwood, a new installer with only a day or two days experience, don't even know how to read the compass. Normally, an experience installer can tell just by look at the site, in Texas, where some area does has lots tall tree around the house, when I was drove hour to that site, I uses can tell customer it maybe hard time to peak a signal, normally, customer already has the dish there, and I will tell customer I will try but if there can't get a signal, its a no go and I will charge a reasonable for the try, if the job is from dish, I don't even bother for that because I can not charge the customer or it will waste my time.

 

[cybok0]

Knowing about dishpointer or not is no excuse; the minute some told her to start whacking the 2nd, 3rd or more trees she should have screamed stop and got some alternate opinions .

I do agree with you, but the reality is that a lot of people don't have common sense.

 

[charper1]

its too bad we cant legislate common sense!

 

[Liquidforce88]

its too bad we cant legislate common sense!

Could you please describe common sense, so we can attempt to legislate it?

 

[Van]

Seems that alot of you are asuming that the customer is an efficienado like the other 100k+ members we have here on this site when thats not the case. The majority of customers for satellite are putting some degrea of trust into the technician that comes out in the belief that he knows what he's doing and has been trained to do the job right. I've seen this same scenario happen before but not to this scale and have been the second technician to come out only to find that someone goofed the location several times.

Dont asume either that just because someone from direct told ironwood not to do something like not tell customers to cut tree's that any tech is going to follow the rules, again this is something that I've seen other techs do when I worked for dish and it came back to bite one while others got away with it time and time again and I witnessed a couple techs pruning tree's down and customers will at times pressure a tech to tell them what tree's to cut.

Consider for a moment if you didnt know anything that you do now about dbs and didnt know anything about any of the tools and information available to you online and then put yourself in the customers shoe's.

 

[HDinCincy]

I thought this HAD to be an urban legend because who could possibly be that stupid. Well, I was wrong... there are even pix on the KOMO website. What an idiot. You move somewhere for the trees and then BLINDLY accept an opinion about what trees need to be removed, JUST TO WATCH TV. As Van states, many of us know more than the basics, but what percentage are we? This is just too sad, and yet she is the one that made the choice. Nobody else cut them without her consent. According to the story she did it herself with her neighbor's help. The company (Ironwood says they didn't own the company when this happened) said IF you want it, here's what should go. I'm still flummoxed about it.

 

[Van]

Problem is that the installer told her that tree's would have to come down and if theres enough evidence that he told her this then Ironwood/Directv will have a choice of working with her or going to court and Washington state is one of those places that has alot of tree huggers.

 

[charper1]

"A fool and his/her money are soon parted".

 

[NGeorge]

This makes me laugh... Ironwood communications sent an installer out with a very bad attitude a few months ago, who told me we would have to cut down a bunch of very tall trees at my parent's new place--even though I knew there was line of sight from doing my own installs.

Needless to say, I persisted and demanded a new tech--who flat out agreed with me--and said "I don't know what that guy was smoking"--and my parents have DirecTV at their new place. HOWEVER--this was only after sending the original dumbass out THREE times, when I requested a new tech--and who had a worse attitude each time until I chewed him off the property and said that I was going to keep calling until this was fixed--and that if he got a work order with that address on it again to just give it to someone else.

NOW, I know what I am doing--my parents told me to just "deal with it" and get their TV set up--had it been them, however, I could have easily seen them going to Dish Network (which had a previous dish installed) and telling DirecTV to end a 10 year relationship.

--Nat