Karen thinks that the technicians who come to service her DirecTV system are competent, professional, and just great. She has no complaints. Her problem is with the system that schedules them and gets them to her house. Well, the system is supposed to get them to her house. In practice, it just tells her that they’re supposed to come to her house, and she sort of crosses her fingers and hopes that they show up.

Here is the timeline of events the last time that DirecTV was supposed to send someone to fix the whole-house DVR system.

Called Sunday, November 11 for appointment on Saturday, November 17 between noon and 4:00PM.

Friday, Nov. 16 evening called DirecTV to confirm appointment. It was confirmed.

Saturday (day of appointment) – Waited until 4:00 PM. I called DirecTV inquiring if we were still on the schedule. They e-mailed the local office and we received a call 20 minutes later. The woman on the phone confirmed we were still on the schedule and said that a supervisor would call us and gave us his phone number. She couldn’t give us any additional information about what time we would receive service. The supervisor never called so we tried calling the number given to us and there was no answer. We left a voice mail before 5:00 PM asking for a call back. No call was received.

5:04 – Called DirecTV again. The notes at the national office indicated that we should have someone at our house in the next two hours (which would be by 7:00 – 7:30 PM) They e-mailed the local office again saying that we would receive a call from that office within 20 minutes. No call was received.

6:21 – called DirecTV again asking if we were still on the schedule. Their notes indicated that we were still scheduled and we were supposed to have someone there again in the next two hours, which at that point would make the service call as late as 8:30 PM. Again – they had to e-mail the local office and said we should receive a call back within 20 minutes and we didn’t receive a call.

DirecTV was a no show and we received no calls from the local office except for the one shortly after 4:00 and that was in response to us calling and inquiring if they were still coming. No call was received cancelling or rescheduling the appointment and we stayed at home for over 8 hours waiting for someone to show. We did receive a $50 service credit which I had to request and that took 30 minutes on the phone. We understand that service calls are unpredictable. Our main problem is that no one called to cancel or reschedule and we sat at home on a Saturday from noon until 8:30 PM (at which point we gave up). If we had received the courtesy of one call, I wouldn’t be writing about this. There apparently is no way that DirecTV can contact the service company and get answers except for e-mail.

We called Sunday morning and DirecTV e-mailed the national contracting office and they called us back. They had to e-mail the local office and we were supposed to receive call again in 20 minutes. No call was received. Everyone at DirecTV that we talked to were “deeply apologetic”. I literally heard that phrase 30 times.

We have been customers since 1999 and when our contract is up – we will be looking at alternatives.

In the past, DirecTV customers have found help by e-mailing CEO Mike White. As far as we know, the address is still active, so we won’t print it for the spamsters to pick up. The company e-mail format is firstname.lastname@directv.com. If you can’t figure it out from there, you probably aren’t savvy enough to be e-mailing CEOs.

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