So our DVR has been acting up in recent months. We have one from the cable company. Yes yes, I know, Tivos are better. Ours works well enough (when we aren't having problems with it, that is) and it came free with digital cable. Good enough for me.
Anyway, we've been having problems with it. Some minor things, like the program guide acting funky, but mainly that the box would crash and reboot itself with some regularity. We should have dealt with this a long time ago, but we always had better things to do, plus there were always a bunch of shows on the DVR that we didn't want to lose. So we lived with it, until a couple of nights ago when it crashed and apparently went back to a three-week-old backup. Everything from February was gone, and a bunch of shows from January that we'd watched and deleted were back.
OK, time to get a new box! I called cable company tech support yesterday morning, told them what was happening, and asked if I had to make an appointment to replace the DVR or if I could just bring it to their office. She said I could just bring it in, but there'd be a $20 charge. "If it's broken, why do I have to pay to get a new one?" She explained that the charge is if I make the choice to come in and replace it on my own. If I let them do their own troubleshooting, they'll either repair it or replace it at no charge.
I'm no hardware expert, but I do know that at my job, a server which did that -- especially after such a failure history -- would be swapped out immediately, no time wasted on diagnosis or repair until after a new machine was up and running. But whatever, I'm not going to spend $20 proving a point. So I went through the troubleshooting. Which consisted of unplugging the machine, rebooting it, and noting that it seemed fine but our February programs were still gone. At which point she scheduled a service call for this morning.
I had more time yesterday than today, but again, whatever. The repairman called this morning on his way to my house and asked me to describe the problem. I told him about the crashing and the lost programs, and he said immediately that I need a new box. Hmm, what a good idea! He also said, "just to let you know, next time you have a problem like this, you can just take it to the office without having to schedule a service call." I told him I had tried that first, but wanted to avoid the $20 charge. His response was "WHAT?"
The guy was irate. Not at me of course, but at whoever told me that. He said that it costs the company $115 for every service call. He said he was going to bring it up at their next tech meeting and find out what the heck was going on. He also told me that there's a diagnostic on the box, you just enter channel 999 and it will show you all kinds of information about the system, hard drive status, etc. If the woman on tech support had told me to do that, we probably would have seen that the box needed replacing and could have avoided the service call.
I think this is a classic example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. There's probably a very good reason, from the point of view of the call center, to discourage people from bringing in their boxes. (Indeed, the repairman told me that the problem isn't usually the hardware, although in my case it obviously was.) And there's probably a lot of pressure on the phone people to keep the calls as short as possible. If that means shunting everybody off to service calls without doing any diagnostics, so what? That's another department.
I am so glad I have never worked for a large corporation.
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