To the point of beyond frustration

I went into a state of beyond frustration, if there is such a thing, the other night while trying to help out my parents.

A few Sundays ago, the DirecTV service at my parents’ house went out. Somehow, I got the lucky task of trying to help them resolve the issue.

Knowing what was ahead of me I elected to wait until the next night to try and get it done. Simple fix, right? Won’t take long to get this taken care of, right? Quick call and all will be good, right? For some reason, I knew I was in dream world thinking it would be a smooth process.

First of all, it took about 20 minutes to even get a live person at DirecTV to pick up the phone call. Once I finally got someone, we

had to conference call my mom in on the call because she was in a different location than me. That took a little finagling, but we soon had a three-way conversation  going to attempt to figure out why their TV went black with a mes- sage coming up, “No service available.”

Within minutes of getting a service associate on the phone, the pass the buck game began

in earnest. For nearly the next three hours, we were transferred to various departments.  One after another assured us that the next transfer would be the one that would be able to resolve the issue. Well, guess what? Nothing got resolved. I only grew more irritated and frus- trated with each passing minute of being on the phone with these goons.

At one point during one of the transfers, I kept hearing a recording of Spanish. I didn’t think much of it at the time. But after about 15 minutes, you wouldn’t guess what happened next. We had a Spanish associate on the phone who couldn’t speak English. And, of course, I couldn’t speak Spanish. So, you know

where that all went. No where!

Finally, I was able to convey enough to get the Spanish associate to transfer me once again to someone who could help, preferably someone who speaks English.

I lost count but I think we were transferred at least 10 different times. Even near the end of the call, an asso- ciate advised us to hang up and call back the same number that we started with three hours previously. I’m like “Oh, no you’re going to deal with us now or else.”

After three hours of frustration and blood pressure raising to the point of no return, I hung up and let my mother deal with the rest on her end. She spent another 30 minutes or so with an associate before they finally made an appointment  to come out on Saturday to deal with their DirecTV issue. Why couldn’t

that have happened more than three hours ago instead of wasting our evenings getting more and more annoyed.

The best part of it all was I went on a 5-mile brisk walk, came home and took a break for 20 minutes, then went to a store to purchase some items for my daughter and came back home to begin editing the newspaper. All of this hap- pened while I was on the phone dealing with the lack of  customer service from DirecTV.

To top it off, DirecTV sent me a customer survey the next morning wondering how its service was. Well, let me tell you! You can imag- ine what I said.

Making matters worse for my mother was that she somehow misplaced her hearing aid while she was on the phone. Last I heard she’s still in hot pursuit of tracking down her hear-

ing device. Life is never dull, is it?