What??
Elstevo said:
Kind of thought most people that I've run into (aside from the NFL Sunday Ticket fanatics) were a bit more reasonable on the various forums, this thread proved to me otherwise and will discourage many D* employees from assisting in the fututre.
No "NFL Sunday Ticket Fanatic" here. In fact, if I do in fact decide to activate the three DVRs I bought yesterday and become a D* customer I will more than likely never subscribe to Sunday Ticket.
The only people being unreasonable on this thread are D* apologists. You don't run a company with tens of millions of customers this way.
I don't know if you're rich, or what, but to me $100 a month is a lot of money to pay for a product that's not there for over 10% of the month. If the phone company shut down a large percentage of its customer base for over 3 days because a system-wide upgrade went bad, and they hadn't planned accordingly, you probably wouldn't be so forgiving.
My decision to spend this much money on what is clearly a luxury is based on a quality of life decision. And that's what D* is selling. I work long, hard hours (12 hours a day, on average, and yes, some nights and weekends). If I spend my hard-earned time off and money staring at Tanya Memme for hours on end (as pleasing a sight as that is) because of D*'s screw up I have every right to be upset.
If I choose to go with DirecTV I will pay more money for the same service than I am currently paying with DISH. DISH has always been very customer-service friendly to me. My main reason for wanting to leave DISH is because of the "Heath Kit" behavior of my receivers of late.
The reason I am considering the move is because of the fact that D* has been held out as a more stable alternative to E*, both on the hardware and system side of things. Given the events of the last four days, any "reasonable" person would say that D* has not shown to enjoy a stability advantage.
The boxes are in my house already, the installation order has been placed. I plan on giving D* a chance. But they're walking up to the plate with two strikes against them, so they better protect the strike zone and swing for contact.
This outage was not caused by little gremlins in the system. This outage was caused by conflicts of code and hardware that could have, and should have been detected before throwing the switch. I may be missing something, but aren't the D* employees the ones that designed this system?
As far as D* employees assisting in the future, they better understand that they screwed up royally, and the company's poor decision making has resulted in a heavier burden for them all. Theirs is not to whine about things. Theirs is to suck it up and rebuild credibility. If they can't stand the heat of working for the largest satellite provider in the world they need to go to work for a nice little non-profit, where working nights and weekends never happens, and 4 day outages are acceptable.