Navdeep Shergill (A Geek at heart)

DishNetwork - I hate them!

April 18th, 2006

Ok, since I have my personal site; I think I can use it to rant. I absolutely hate Dish Network. Remember my earlier post about Dilbert? Well, I think they are a bunch of ‘drunken lemurs’. Thats how much I hate them. Yesterday when I go to turn on my TV; the dish receiver wasn’t working properly. Any channel that I would try to view it would print out an error message: “You are not authorized to view this channel.”. Thats funny; because I remember being authorized last night when I was watching the same channel. So I go through the all too familiar process of ‘hold down the power button, wait 10 seconds, and then wait for it to reestablish connection”. So I do that, and then I wait about 5 minutes while it tires to ‘download the TV GUIDE’. Mind you I only have about 60 channels. So I thought all is good now. Boy was I Wrong!!
It somehow decides that it is only going to let me view the local channels (about 5) and my 5 High Definition channels. All other channels it is still saying the same error message. So I decide to call Customer Service. I wasn’t really looking forward to it since it was about 7pm and I knew I would be on hold for a long time. Thank god for speaker phones!

Anyways; first time I call, a girl answers. I explain the problem and then she says: Please hold on while I transfer you to someone who can help you. Ok, why didn’t that person just pick up the phone in the first place. I knew what was coming up next. Against my better judgement; I said: “Ok, transfer me”. As soon as I said that; I heard this nice voice message: “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again.” AGHHHH! She disconnected me! This was not going good. I decided to call again; wait another 15 minutes on the phone. This time a tech picks up the phone (another girl). I explain the problem and she says: “Oh, it seems like you don’t have any reception”. Gee.. thanks.. Anyways; she offers to send someone to my home to “fix it”. So I ask how much is that going to be? $99!! But I have a warranty. Oh, because I have a warranty; now it will only cost me $29 to have someone from Dish Network come out and fix their Dish. I am sure glad I bought the warranty. Anyways; I decide to give it some time and call them tomorrow to schedule it. So I turn off the receiver and leave it unplugged.

Fast forward to this morning; we plug in the receiver.. and it WORKS! The damn thing just works. WOOT! Saved $29 (which will take me a year to make using adsense). Anyways; I am really pissed at Dish since they could have just told me to just turn off the receiver for a few hours but they just saw an opportunity to make some money and jumped on it. I can’t wait until my contract is over with them and I can go get Cable instead.

Entry Filed under: Personal, Uncategorized