DTV

I will begin by apologizing for my absence again. There times that when my husband doesn't have new cadets going through his school and he has time off so that is spent with the family.
These past few days have been a big headache though. Not because of my husband LOL! It started off with our Xbox 360 having that dreaded red ring of death, so we need to send that back to the company. Then I bit the bullet and finally gave in and told my husband it was ok for him to order HD from DirecTv. It cost almost 300 dollars because they were charging for the HD receiver, 20 dollars for delivery, plus the service itself. They came out to install it about 3 days after my husband made the call.
Installation went rather quickly, my husband actually made it home as they were leaving so he was able to ask any questions that lingered. The installers hadn't been gone for 1/2 hour when the HD cable quit working. We called Directv and they walked us through trouble shooting and got the satellite to work again but not on the HD cable. While on the phone my husband asked if they could send a replacement cable. We were informed that they would not under any circumstance send out another cable....ok. In order to just get my husband off the phone they offered us a premium channel for a month free, with a huge sigh we gave up on getting anything done.
Now the HD really wasn't much better then non HD, it took a very long time just to switch channels. By a long time I mean it wasn't instant it actually took 20 seconds or so to switch channels because it had to adjust pic size and all kinds of tweaks. They (direcTv) did not work with TiVo to develop the HD DVR so there are features that we had on the TiVo DVR (which was through Dtv) that were simply not there with the HD. All in all it ended up being a huge disappointment to my husband. We called Dtv and explained to them these products were just not for us at this time and we would like go back to our regular program with our Tivo dvr, which they had no problem doing for us. While on the phone my husband asked 3 times if we would still be billed for the HD things, he was told we would get a prepaid box and to return the receiver and remote and we would not be charged for anything. They actually said they were taking 5 dollars off our bill for 3 month because of all the trouble. The box came quickly and the very next day I mailed off the receiver. You would think my story would end there...........Nope of course not.

A couple of days ago I got a bill in the mail where they had taken 160 dollars out of my bank account, by they I mean DirecTv. My husband calls and was told that they were putting in a request to have the money returned but could not guarantee that it would!!! He promptly took us off the auto pay. He was told he would be contacted in 5 days if the money would be able to be returned. So we are being charged for a service, receiver that we don't have and actually only had for about 4 hours. I do plan to allow them the five days but after than I am signing a affidavit to have the return of 100 of the 160 returned.
I believe that they need to work out all the bugs and perhaps go back to working with TiVo in developing the DVRs. But as the programming and equipment stands now it really isn't right for our family at this time. For us we were greatly disappointed by the customer service and the programming.