There’s almost nothing I hate more than having to deal with customer support. For anything. Ever.

Certainly, I’m not alone.

Today, the disk in our Dish Network ViP622 DVR died. I did all the standard troubleshooting before calling them. I can certainly check to see if the damned thing is plugged in quicker if I don’t have to talk to some dope on the phone while doing it.

But of course, that’s not good enough. OK, fine, so I went through it all again while on the phone. But then, twenty minutes of phone time was completely wasted because my name’s not “Teresa”. You see, the account is in my wife’s name, not mine.

On the surface, that doesn’t seem so bad. I mean, you wouldn’t want some stranger calling up and canceling your service on you. But, if you take into account the first 10 minutes of the phone call, it becomes ridiculous.

When you first call into Dish Network, you get an automated call system. It appears you can do anything in it. In fact the first thing it wanted me to do was set up a new PIN. Wait, what? Yeah, that’s right. By just calling them from my home number, they thought that was enough security that I could change the controlling password on my account.

I skipped that. Perhaps I shouldn’t have…. Anyhow, the next thing they said was that my bill was overdue and would be charged a late fee if not paid today. It also said that the last payment was about ten days ago. But we use autopay. I ignored this as well, choosing to wait another 10 minutes for an operator. Now, after the day’s experience, I’m worried that they’re charging us a late fee every month. Via autopay. Yeah, I’m probably just being paranoid.

Anyhow, if their automated call system doesn’t mind me dealing with the account, why should their operator. I wasn’t trying to cancel or change anything. I was scheduling service. Sorry, but I see no need for them to talk to my wife.

Now I’m trying to figure out if Comcast can install cable. The notion of dealing with Comcast has me more than a little worried. Ugh.