I hate Games in Business Transactions

I Hate playing games with vendors or suppliers of services.

All too often these days people seem to want to play games with your paycheck, they want to play games with your bills, games with your mail, your email, your online accounts. They want to play games with you returning things.

DirecTV after two and half weeks finally got around to sending me a “recovery kit”

Do you know what’s in the recovery kit? Take a guess it’s not what you would think…

I was expecting a large box with a couple of return labels.  I was going to put both of the DirecTV receivers in the big box and then take the big box to the post office.

What I got was a package full of labels… No box, no packing material, nothing that I could put the DirecTV receivers in to make sure that they got back to DirecTV.

The first passing thought was slap the stickers directly on the receivers themselves and send that to DirecTV however I knew the post office wouldn’t take them that way.

So I found a couple boxes down in the garage.

The receivers are in the boxes covered in ghost poop, I’m not at all sure that they’ll survive the rough handling that I know the postal service will subject them to. At this point I don’t really care… much.  I do, the machines didn’t do anything wrong they’re in good working order and they shouldn’t be damaged because no-one cares.

I did pack them tightly and with what packaging materials I had available. I just wish that the idiots at DirecTV had sent me the proper boxes with appropriate packing.

Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how the post office wants the labels on the boxes.

Clearly DirecTV was trying to do nothing more than make it difficult for me to return their product

We came to an end of our relationship after eight years because of exactly this kind of game playing.

If I want to cancel my service I should be able to cancel my service, it should be no harm no foul.

I should be able to put the receivers in the box and I should be able to send the box back to DirecTV.

Instead I had to make three requests for the recovery kit

After the third request what I get is a package full of labels not shipping boxes.

I know what the game is about and how it’s played.

It’s all about them figuring “Maybe if we make it to hard for this person to get rid of the receivers,  if we make it so that he’s going to be charged a ton of money if he keeps the receivers for any length of time after the contract is up maybe he’ll sign up with us again, maybe we can continue to get the $120 or $130 a month.”

All I can say is they don’t know me very well.

With me, the harder you make something, the more annoyed I get, the more likely I will go to the ends of the Earth to accomplish my goal.

In this case I’m going to make sure that I can put DirecTVs equipment straight up their collective ass.

So DirecTV not only did you lose a customer because I couldn’t make changes to my plan without having to go to some kind of unbelievable game with plan switches, and 2 year contracts all of which was designed to make absolutely sure that I ended up spending more money than I was originally, you’ve also lost a customer forever.

I cannot imagine myself doing any business at all with DirecTV from here on out I’m not going to say never.  But it is sure as hell going to require a lot of thought before I sign my name on any dotted line with these people.