Ironwood Communications for DirecTV

After 5 or so years of discreet peeks and longing looks every time we were in an electronics shop, or a home furnishings store, or at Costco, my husband FINALLY purchased his dream, a 47 inch LCD flat screen TV (a Vizio that we bought at Costco, which I may review at some point down the road). He was incredibly excited, and called DirecTV, the company from which we get our cable service, to schedule the install. We purchased the TV on Dec 31, they scheduled our install appointment for Sunday Jan 14th, the absolute first day they said they could come out and do it. We are only getting the receiver box not the DVR, mostly because I feel we have spent enough for the TV at this point, with the TV and the stand and the cables and the new
DVD player, something he "forgot" to mention were the additional hidden expenses (I knew about the stand).

As most of you know, or can read in my profile, I live in Utah. There are two things you need to know about Utah for the purposes of this entry, 1) A lot of people don't like to work on Sundays here because of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) as they call themselves, or the Mormons, as most other people call them, and 2) Utah is one of the rare places actually experiencing a winter this year, and by winter, I mean it was about 4-5 degrees F on the 14th of Jan, and that was the high. As you can imagine, I wasn't terribly surprised when Ironwood Communications, the installation company, called and said our installer wasn't going to make it due to a "family emergency". Whatever, he probably didn't want to get up on the freezing roof to dink around with our dish. We were rescheduled for the following Friday, the 19th, making it about 3 weeks from when we placed the order to when we get the box.

Fast forward to Thursday Dec 18th. Husband is madly trying to catch a plane back home from his latest work trip so that he can be home for the installation and 3 glorious days of HiDef programming, when I get a phone call, it goes something like this

Ironwood Communications (IC): Is Mr. Dr. Sue there?

Dr. Sue: He isn't available at the moment, who is this?

IC: This is Ironwood communications, we are scheduled to come and install your HD box tomorrow, and we need to cancel the appointment and reschedule for 2 more weeks out, how is Feb 3rd?

Dr. Sue: What? Why are you rescheduling this appointment? We have already been rescheduled once! That means we'll have waited for 5 weeks for this installation!

IC: We don't have any HD boxes and DirecTV has a 2 week back order on any more. There isn't anything we can do.

Dr. Sue: But what happened to the box that you were going to install in our house last Sunday? You are the ones who cancelled that appointment. Did you install it in someone else's house?

IC: YES.

It just deteriorated from there. The rude lady at IC said that there wasn't anything she could do and that we needed to contact DirecTV directly. Which is what Husband did. From the Airport. Where he was catching a flight home from a business trip so he could be home Friday afternoon for the installation. After he had me reassure him several times that I was not joking.

He did very well, DirecTV started by saying there wasn't anything they could do, then they offered him $10 per month off our bill for a year. That is the price of the HD programming addition, so that was a good start, he said. Then they gave us $101 credit for the "missed installation appointment" which basically pays for the HD box. This was good too, but we still had to wait 2 more weeks for the installation of the box, and a look at our bill showed that they were already charging us for the HD service. The service that we couldn't use because we didn't have the box yet.

The nice lady at DirecTV asked him if he could stay on the line a little longer. "No", he said, "I can't because I am on the airplane, returning home early from my business trip because I had an appointment to meet the DirecTV installation guy tomorrow, and they are about to close the plane's doors". In the background she could hear the flight attendant announcements, and realized just how disruptive the whole situation was. She apologized again and he hung up and turned off his phone.

Friday morning, IC called back. "Sir, it looks like we managed to find a HD box after all, can we come out and install it tomorrow?" We got out $240 in credits AND our box! Happy days! Now Husband is gorging himself silly on HD programming until Tuesday, when he once again takes off for his next trip. We think DirecTV must have called IC and ripped them a total new one over the situation and told them to get us a box no matter what.

All in all, great review of DirecTV and their response to our problems, but nothing but negatives for Ironwood Communications. Apparently, we're not alone in this assessment, either. I did a quick Google search of IC and was amazed at the number of negative reviews, at a national level. My recommendation, if you have a choice as to who installs your dish if you are in the market for one, pick anyone BUT Ironwood Communications!