Last month, a most unpleasant email reached my inbox. It was from our apartment complex informing us that they’d no longer be supplying us with complimentary DirecTV and that our service would be canceled on March 1st. Not to worry though – the message noted that they were making this move to give us more options!
Eye rolling spin aside, after we looked at the price of continuing the service and decided it wouldn’t be worth it, I realized that, by canceling the service, they’d also saddled me with the responsibility of getting my equipment returned lest I be charged for failing to do so. Cut to this week, right before I left for an extended trip, it was time to figure out exactly what I needed to do.
To tell you I was dreading this whole process would be an understatement. Thus, when I called the company that originally set up our DirecTV, I initially anticipated that I’d need to return the equipment to them. Instead, they informed me that I’d just send it to DirecTV. What’s more, when I asked for an address, they told me that I could just go to the UPS Store and they’d take care of it. Color me skeptical.
After hanging up, I did look at the DirecTV site and, sure enough, it did say that you could take the equipment to any corporate-owned UPS Store or FedEx. Unfortunately, the UPS Store site didn’t seem to notate whether a location was “corporate owned.” Still, I decided to take my chances at the closest Store to me.
As I arrived with nothing more than the box and the remote, I was prepared to get the full runaround and pay handsomely for the eventual service. Instead, the team member simply asked for my name and account number, scanned the barcode on the box, and handed me a receipt proving that I’d returned the equipment (he did advise me to hold onto it for at least six months, saying DirecTV was bad about saying they didn’t receive the stuff.). That was it! I was in and out in less than five minutes and I didn’t even have to touch a roll of packing tape.
On that note, while time will tell whether or not I’ll actually need to argue with DirecTV about the status of my return, for now, I’m immensely relieved. With all of the stress of the past few weeks (there are several articles coming, rest assured), the last thing I needed was to worry about the shipping of some DVR that will probably just be smashed Office Space style anyway. Thankfully, to their credit, it seems DirecTV has made things pretty easy — although I can’t speak to the actual process of canceling since I skipped that part. So, while cable and satellite companies have bad reputations that are usually well-earned, I have to give them a qualified “thumbs up” on this one.