cease your ingress

a tip for any business involved in doing things at customer houses: if you show up and the customer is not available, call them and leave a voicemail and/or leave a note on their door.

directv was scheduled to install my service yesterday "between 8am and noon", so i woke up early and worked from home waiting for the guy to show up. well i waited, and waited and waited. i occasionally checked the front door to make sure there was no note, but nothing was ever there.

noon rolled around with no show, so i called directv and asked where the installer was. the lady told me that a note on my order said that the installer showed up and i was not here, so he left. odd, since i specifically took off of work and sat around here all morning doing nothing while waiting for this guy to show up. i was never called (no voicemail or missed calls on my phone) and i had no indication that the installer ever showed up.

i was told to call the installer and reschedule, and in doing so i was transferred to his supervisor. the supervisor told me "the technician came to your house and you weren't there... you have a two story gray house" -- because, you know, if they actually know what color my house is, that right there is proof that they were here and that i didn't answer the door and that everything is my fault. i asked him what time the installer was here because i was here all morning, but he couldn't give me a specific time.

i probably could have saved a few hours of my life if i had actually known that the installer had shown up at 8am and i missed him; i could have called them back right afterwards and got the guy back out. but instead, i was left to wait until the end of the 4-hour installation window assuming that he had never come out at all.

at dls, our wireless signup page has 2-hour installation windows and collects up to 3 phone numbers from you. if our wireless installers show up and you're not there, the installer waits while someone at dls tries to get a hold of you at all of the numbers you gave. and if all that fails, he leaves a note on your door telling you when he was there.

anyway, 2 hours later, the installer came back out and set everything up. the house already had a dish mounted on the side of the house when i moved in, so he just had to replace the center receiver part of it and put receivers in each room. so now i have more channels for half the price of what i was paying with comcast, and i have speed channel once again. comcast moved all of the channels around a long time ago and moved speed into some separate package that i would have had to pay extra for. you suck, comcast.