Just had a call on my cell. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let it go to voice mail. I have transcribed the full text of the message. The first word starts in the middle, so it is obvious the automated system had already said a sentence or two while my recorded “Please leave a message” thing was playing, so I missed the beginning.
From 877-778-2578 at 00:09 UTC on 2007 Sep 25:
… As you are on the DirecTV do not call list we are not able to contact you for these exciting offers. The reason I’m calling you today is to give you an opportunity to change your selections. If you allow us to remove you from the DirecTV do not call list please be assured that we will not share your information with anyone else. Please call 1-877-778-2578 to remove your account from the DirecTV do not call list. You will then be eligible to receive exciting offers in the future. If you prefer to remain on DirecTV’s do not call list we completely respect your decision and your privacy and no action is required. Thank you for being a loyal DirecTV customer.
Excuse me??? I’m on your do not call list, so you are calling me to ask me to please take you off your do not call list? So you can call me about crap I don’t want? Excuse me? EXCUSE ME? I already told you not to call me. Assholes.
We were already planning to switch away from DirecTV as soon as either of our two DirecTivos die since they are no longer manufactured and you can only get them on the secondary market for way over what was the market price when they were still being made… all since DirecTV decided they wanted to push their own second rate DVRs instead of real Tivos.
Anyway, this call just makes me not have any regrets on that planned move. It may even end up accelerating it. (Although I don’t see us switching until early next year unless our existing hardware does die.)
What a crock.
More Internet comments on unwanted calls from this phone number here including at least a couple comments suggesting that it might not really be DirecTV. Dunno. Very annoyed regardless.
I miss my tivo, however they have continuosly improved the software on their HD DVR to the point where it’s good. At first it was unreliable piece of crap, that locked up crashed, would not record anything reliably, now it works, doesn’t get confused with simple things they have fixed a lot of the pet peeves I had about it when I got it. Do I prefer the TV interface? Yes. However I would not switch to cable. I had cable for ahilw recently and the motorola DVR’s are really atrocious, their signal sucks and I refuse to submit my tv to inferior signal.
I have DirecTV for Tivo, not Tivo for DirecTV. Once I can’t use my Tivo with it, DirecTV is gone the next day. I of course would not use a cable company DVR, I’d use a real Tivo, which these days have dual Tuners and HD for cable.
As for quality, I was never bothered by my cable quality when I had cable, and doubt I will be again, although who knows.
Of course, at this point over 90% of my TV watching is via Slingbox to my computer. I hardly ever watch on an actual TV any more. (Or the projector, which has been our main TV for years but is primarily used for DVDs not TV.) So for me the quality bottleneck will probably more often be the Slingbox than the input signal.