Weather Knocks Out My DirecTV, Rep Tells Us We'll Suffer Long Wait, Get Little Credit (Updated)

UPDATE: DirecTV has says it will get Steve’s service going again soon and give him six months of credit.

The original post:

A snowstorm over the weekend deep-sixed Steve’s DirecTV service, and he says the satellite provider has some bad news for him: Not only will he have to wait two weeks for a service technician to make a visit, but he’ll only receive $5 credit for suffering the outage.

Here’s the email Steve sent DirecTV’s CEO:

Over the weekend we had a snowstorm that dumped a lot of snow in our area. We lost service because of this due to the snow covering the dish and the dish becoming misaligned. We contacted Customer Service and they created a support ticket and they stated that that they will send an technician out in 2 weeks! We asked if they had an earlier time they stated no. We asked about getting credited for the loss of service and all they would give us is $5. $5 is not enough to cover for the loss of service for 2 weeks. We called again today and the customer support rep was rude over the phone and did not want to help us with our issue. They would not confirm that we had a support ticket in the system. So now we feel that we are back at square one.

We’ve been DirecTV subscribers since day one, and in fact we were one of the original 10,000 that were with the company since you’ve started. We’ve always loved the service, but after this incident and many others in the last 2 years we are seriously looking into dropping DirecTV and going elsewhere. All I am asking for is better compensation while we wait for the dish to be repaired. 2 weeks is long enough to be without TV and we are considering moving service so we can watch TV in a more timely matter.

What’s the longest you’ve ever suffered from a TV outage, and what did you do to pass the time?

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