Rant #1:
Yesterday, I had the displeasure of dealing with Dish TV. On review of my latest monthly statement, I noticed a $5.00 "Programming Access Fee" charge. Since I did not recall accessing any programs, I called their customer 'disservice'.
First phone call cut off while connecting. Third attempt connected with a representative who immediately tried to sell me some or other insurance for $5.99 per month while skilfully avoiding my questioning of the $5.00 charge. She suffered from an extremely powerful case of verbal diarrhea. Eventually, I had to raise my voice (yes, I did shout) at her and tell her to stop talking. I then inquired whether she was reading from a script. She claimed not to.
Once again, I asked what the charge was for. Turns out that on May 6, Dish TV attempted to access their receiver(s) in my house and apparently my phone line was down, or didn't permit them to connect. Hence the $5.00 charge. She tried to convince me that I should call them when there was a break in this communication link. At this point, smoke was coming out of every orifice in my head and I requested that I be connected to a supervisor.
When he came on the line, I advised him that I found Dish TV's practice of charging this fee to not only be offensive, but seems to me that it is borderline theft. In a perfect world, my phone line would never go down and Dish would never have to "do upgrades". If there was a company who guaranteed 100% uptime, I suggested that we should both invest there as we would make a lot of money. I advised him that I had absolutely no interest in monitoring my connection between my telephone line and Dish TV boxes 24/7/365 - what were they doing??. Bottom line is he credited my account for next month, but insisted on putting me through to tech support - reason(s) unknown.
I discussed this issue with tech support and advised then not to put this charge through again. They advised that it was noted on my account, but it may happen again.
If you have this or similar systems, be warned to monitor your bills for these scam/blatant theft charges. And ask yourself this: In this day and age, they send signals hundreds of miles into the sky, bounce them off a tiny object, catch then on a small antenna and show them to you in HD too. WHY THEN do they need a telephone line to perform upgrades to their system AND if you don't have a line connected, they charge you $5.00. Will this $5.00 charge make everything right and they will never upgrade your receivers again??? OR are they just monitoring everything you do???
Just as an aside, I am waiting over a year for this same company to award me a $100 refund offer that they had when you signed up for a new service. This is in spite of mailing information to them twice and numerous follow up phone calls to them and promises by them. Next step? An ombudsman?
Rant #2
I purchased an item from Kmart/Sears online. Why? Because they didn't carry it in the stores and it was only available online. At the time of purchase it was priced at $199 with FREE shipping promo. I went ahead and ordered the item and made sure that if I was not happy with it, I could return it to a store. I was assured that this was the case.
The item arrived, and I was concerned about some of the components and decided to return it to a Kmart store. They asked me for the packing slip which I had not noticed in the package, but found stuck to the exterior of the box. When I produced this, the customer 'disservice' representative proceeded to refund me $149.
Shocked, I asked what happened to the other $50? She showed me the packing slip and sure enough, the price shown was $149. It seems that the "FREE" shipping is indeed $50 and to counter this, they reduced the purchase price by $50. Since they do not refund shipping charges, that's it. You lose!!!
Now, nowhere on their website or in discussion with their online representative was this anomaly ever mentioned or displayed. So, be warned of another devious scam at work.
Sad to see how big companies are also masters at the art of scamming. Somewhere there must be a way to expose them for all to see and force them become honest businesses. All I ask is a fair shake.
End of rant. If you got this far, thanks for reading.
Yesterday, I had the displeasure of dealing with Dish TV. On review of my latest monthly statement, I noticed a $5.00 "Programming Access Fee" charge. Since I did not recall accessing any programs, I called their customer 'disservice'.
First phone call cut off while connecting. Third attempt connected with a representative who immediately tried to sell me some or other insurance for $5.99 per month while skilfully avoiding my questioning of the $5.00 charge. She suffered from an extremely powerful case of verbal diarrhea. Eventually, I had to raise my voice (yes, I did shout) at her and tell her to stop talking. I then inquired whether she was reading from a script. She claimed not to.
Once again, I asked what the charge was for. Turns out that on May 6, Dish TV attempted to access their receiver(s) in my house and apparently my phone line was down, or didn't permit them to connect. Hence the $5.00 charge. She tried to convince me that I should call them when there was a break in this communication link. At this point, smoke was coming out of every orifice in my head and I requested that I be connected to a supervisor.
When he came on the line, I advised him that I found Dish TV's practice of charging this fee to not only be offensive, but seems to me that it is borderline theft. In a perfect world, my phone line would never go down and Dish would never have to "do upgrades". If there was a company who guaranteed 100% uptime, I suggested that we should both invest there as we would make a lot of money. I advised him that I had absolutely no interest in monitoring my connection between my telephone line and Dish TV boxes 24/7/365 - what were they doing??. Bottom line is he credited my account for next month, but insisted on putting me through to tech support - reason(s) unknown.
I discussed this issue with tech support and advised then not to put this charge through again. They advised that it was noted on my account, but it may happen again.
If you have this or similar systems, be warned to monitor your bills for these scam/blatant theft charges. And ask yourself this: In this day and age, they send signals hundreds of miles into the sky, bounce them off a tiny object, catch then on a small antenna and show them to you in HD too. WHY THEN do they need a telephone line to perform upgrades to their system AND if you don't have a line connected, they charge you $5.00. Will this $5.00 charge make everything right and they will never upgrade your receivers again??? OR are they just monitoring everything you do???
Just as an aside, I am waiting over a year for this same company to award me a $100 refund offer that they had when you signed up for a new service. This is in spite of mailing information to them twice and numerous follow up phone calls to them and promises by them. Next step? An ombudsman?
Rant #2
I purchased an item from Kmart/Sears online. Why? Because they didn't carry it in the stores and it was only available online. At the time of purchase it was priced at $199 with FREE shipping promo. I went ahead and ordered the item and made sure that if I was not happy with it, I could return it to a store. I was assured that this was the case.
The item arrived, and I was concerned about some of the components and decided to return it to a Kmart store. They asked me for the packing slip which I had not noticed in the package, but found stuck to the exterior of the box. When I produced this, the customer 'disservice' representative proceeded to refund me $149.
Shocked, I asked what happened to the other $50? She showed me the packing slip and sure enough, the price shown was $149. It seems that the "FREE" shipping is indeed $50 and to counter this, they reduced the purchase price by $50. Since they do not refund shipping charges, that's it. You lose!!!
Now, nowhere on their website or in discussion with their online representative was this anomaly ever mentioned or displayed. So, be warned of another devious scam at work.
Sad to see how big companies are also masters at the art of scamming. Somewhere there must be a way to expose them for all to see and force them become honest businesses. All I ask is a fair shake.
End of rant. If you got this far, thanks for reading.
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