DaveG39

JakesDTVBlog

How awful! I am very sorry for what your friend has gone through. I'm sure it's been pure hell.

I've heard of cable and sat companies doing this sort of thing before. Best case scenario would be a complete waiver of the fee, which I personally think they should do; the fire was the end result of a criminal act - arson - and no fault of his own.

Has he talked to his insurance agent? Homeowner's or renter's insurance should cover that sort of thing, I would think.

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Orrymain

Definitely talk to the insurance folks. Also, I wrote a post earlier about how DirecTV treats customers who have canceled service due to death. I tell you, they are out to get their money no matter what. I would take the issue to your local TV station that does consumer action stories. The times local people have done that, taken this type of thing to our local TV station, DirecTV has backed down.

bicker

Leases of equipment generally come with an obligation on the part of the person to whom the equipment is entrusted to safeguard that equipment from damage or loss. A transfer of risk from the equipment owner to the renter is typically part of the lease. Therefore, if something happens to the equipment, the renter is liable, regardless of the reason.

Definitely include that charge with your homeowners insurance claim. Unless your homeowners insurance did not include such third-party risks, it should be covered.

As alluded to, if you invest the time to embarrass the service provider, they usually will waive the terms and conditions for you to mitigate the bad PR. Sometimes it is worth the effort; but it depends on your own personal appetite for engage in such an activity.

Best of luck.

DaveG39

Thank you for the replies. He had a similar issue with his ISP (also satellite), another friend of his called the ISP posing as a consumer advocate and got the charge reversed. I forgot to mention he didn't have insurance. His partner, who died earlier this year, was in charge of the bills and let it lapse.

JakesDTVBlog

Ouch. That's a shame. Still, as others suggested, see if you can get the local TV stations involved. It can't hurt!

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Piggie

Another reason I won't upgrade to HD service from DirecTV. I imagine one day the SD will go away, and I'll deal with it then.

Regardless of contracts there needs to be a point where a large corporation does the right thing. Instead of hard to the point following of a contract written by them without the possibility of negotiation only to keep the stock holders happy. We have entered a brave new world, where massive holdings of less then 1 % of the population is not only accepted by defended. Doing the right thing be damed.

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bicker

Ridiculous, and ridiculously self-serving. Large corporations do the right thing whey they make decisions based on what is best for their owners.

Still ridiculously self-serving. If you want a socialist country, then just stop with all the pretense and admit that.

Orrymain

That's why I'll never use DirecTV. They have proven that they are too large to care unless a consumer advocate gets a hold of them. My sister is strongly thinking of going to satellite, and she wants me to do it, too. Trust me, if I do, it won't be DirecTV we use.

bicker

The problem with that logic is that when it comes to service providers in this sector, bigger is better. I outlined the example of Fairpoint in another thread this morning. Friends of mine live in NH and they are so incredibly angry that they lost their service from super-colossal Verizon and instead now are serviced by moderately sized Fairpoint.

This really shows how the American consumer, in general, is inconsistent and unreasonable: They want to be serviced by a big company when that is good for them, and want to be service by a small company what that is good for them -- and really want the companies servicing them to change back and forth in size as the circumstances warrant. Utterly unreasonable. Essentially, they just want the world built around consumerism. It is indefensible. And surely whims of that order shouldn't be any indicator of what government should do in terms of regulating commerce.