Tom Eppenberger Jr’s blog

The DirecTV tech that was scheduled to be here between 8a-12p today never showed up, or bothered to call. When I got home tonight, I dealt with their “award-winning” customer service, only to go through the same 20 questions that I have answered on a near daily basis this week… ”no, it isn’t windy,” “nope, no storms,” ”yes, I have reset my receiver,” “yes, I have tried other receivers.”

After 26 minutes, and being apologized to nearly 26 times, I was told (again) that the issue had been escalated to a supervisor and I would definitely get a call back within 4 hours.

5+ hours later, no phone call. So, I give their “award-winning” technical support another call. I got through to a “technical support supervisor” pretty quickly (and, by supervisor here, I simply mean a less polite person in a different call center with less technical knowlege and probably less authority), and was merely apologized to some more. She was “really, really sorry,” and helped me reschedule another service tech for Monday. Oh, and, as it turns out, the service call from this morning was marked as completed in their system…

So, to show how important my business is, she gave me a $100 credit on my bill. Gee, thanks.

I would gladly keep their damn service if they would just tell me what the hell was wrong, and how they were going to fix it. Don’t just keep apologizing to me over and over again, as if you really care about my problem. The tone in your voice told me that you couldn’t be any more void of real emotion when it comes to helping me. Don’t pretend. I mean, I already know that you are patronizing me, but your poor attitude simply helps me come to the realization sooner. I’d really just prefer that you pretend to help me fix the problem, at least I’d be able to go to sleep tonight…

No… you know what, forget it. Seven years of happy, blissful marriage has been destroyed in just seven days. Congratulations, it’s not just any company that could pull this off.

Got home from Quincy tonight around 6:30p. After saying hello to Shelly and Lane, unpacking, and two phone calls, I decided that I better make sure that the DVR was going to record tonight’s Sharks game.

About this time, Shelly started asking when we could cancel our service because she was so pissed at our TV and DVR since we got the HD stuff. You see, every 3-4 days, all of our HD channels become unavailable and the DVR says that it is “searching for signal.” This is total BS, because doing a reboot of the device fixes everything.

Since “there is no time like the present,” I called DirecTV Customer Service and complained about our situation. A few minutes later I was told that I would need to format the drive in the DVR by going through a series of steps, and that if it didn’t fix the problem I would get a new device. Great, easy as pie. Because we had a bunch of unwatched shows, I wasn’t in a position to do it right now though, so I simply rebooted the DVR in order to get the HD stuff working again and have it record the game…

No dice. It hung at step 2 of 2 in the reboot process, and eventually ended up at a white screen that said “Acquiring guide data…” and had an option to get “More Info.” No channels, no nothing. Pressing that more info button simply told me to reset the device, or call customer service and mention service message 772. Another reset ended up in the same thing, so I called back in to DirecTV.

One hour of holding and rebooting later, the very nice technical support rep told me that I was essentially part of an elite group of really pissed off customers. Hurray for me. This was a “new error screen,” and a “team” of engineers in Oregon was working on resolving this issue. No rhyme or reason, no further information or explanations. Just that I would be credited for the outage, and I should get a call from someone within one business day (BTW, Saturday apparently counts as a business day).

So, I ended up listening to the Sharks game on NHL.com. And, for a perfect example of irony, the game radio on NHL.com was sponsored by DirecTV.

I wonder how long it takes to get a new Dish or Comcast line installed?

Watching my first hd-dvd tonight! Picked up a copy of Goodfellas today, and (even though I was skeptical) have to admit that the difference is more than just a little noticable.

Now I can’t wait for my next movie to show up from Netflix!!!

We finally took the plunge into the HDTV world!

I’ve known for quite some time which model TV I wanted to get, but no stores in the area were stocking it. Saturday afternoon, I had had enough.

Knowing it would not fit in my car, I got my Mom to drive me up to the Circuit City in San Rafael to get the damn thing (THANKS MOM!). While paying for the set, and making mindless conversation with the employee, I learned that I was not alone… the previous weekend he sold two of the smaller 40″ Samsung models to a guy from San Jose! He ended up in San Rafael for the same reason as me.

To get the TV into Mom’s car, we had to remove it from the packaging. It’s amazing how much bigger a TV looks when you aren’t just staring at it on the store shelf.

We also bought a new media stand from Crate and Barrel using some gift certificates that Shelly had been sitting on for (at least) a few years. So getting everything up the stairs to the house was quite an adventure!

Stayed up until about 2:00 AM this morning getting it all setup, and was forced to wake up Shelly from a sound sleep to show her the amazing picture.

Xbox 360 stuff looks amazing, but the standard def signal that my DirecTV service is giving me has got to go. Top priority for tomorrow will be calling them to get my service upgraded. It’s so bad that Shelly would rather watch me play Viva Pinata than watch TV!

Also ordered the HD-DVD add-on for my 360 tonight. This is something that I am really excited about… I’ve already gone onto Netflix and changed my preferences so that I get HD-DVD discs whenever possible.

I may look at getting one of these HD-DVD/Blu-Ray hybrid drives eventually (for the sake of convenience), but I’m making an effort to use the Xbox 360 for as much as possible… ’cause I love it so.