The Journal of Joe The Peacock. Yay.: Soooooo.... Guess who's stupid about DirecTV...

8.07.2008:

Soooooo.... Guess who's stupid about DirecTV...

4:23 PM

As it would turn out, I have been paying double for my DirecTV service for the past year.

This is explainable, I promise... But the truth is, even after the explanation, I'm still a moron.

You see, I do not pay the bills in my family. Andrea does. Andrea went to school for six years to be a statistics major with a concentration in actuarial science. She studied long and hard and pressed through many major exams to become certified in her field.

I quit college after a few months to go make a lot more than I was worth making webpages.

She saved her money earned through college so that she could pay off her student loans and perhaps have a little to work with once she earned her degree, certifications, and credentials while looking for a job.

I bought every single N64, Playstation / PS2, Dreamcast and Xbox game that ever came out, the day they came out, and owed exactly 400 bucks a month for rent on a house I shared with my friends.

She is responsible.

I buy 20" widescreen doodlepads for my computer so I can parade around conventions and pretend to be a designer.

SO! She pays the bills. I just do stuff that feels like art until someone decides to make the foolish decision to pay me for it.

I also love football and hockey, and when I signed up for DirecTV, I took advantage of their package deal to get NFL Sunday Ticket and some whiz-bang uberchannel suite. When DirecTV dropped Tivo and started their own DVR thingy, we opted in for those. It was a simple phone call. I never even kept track of what was happening to the bill, I just knew I wanted to record Battlestar Galactica.

So, today I was online making sure NFL Sunday Ticket was on my package, when I noticed I was paying for both a premium package at 109.99 and the Plus DVR package for 69.99 a month. This was news to me... I had no idea we were paying over 200 bucks a month for tv.

So I called my wife - and she responded "Well, you have all that hockey and football stuff, I just figured that's what we paid for tv every month." And she was right to assume so, since that's what the very first bills were like. But in March of last year, with the adding of the DVR package, we had just finished our final installment for that year's NHL Center Ice package.

And of course, I would sooner eat a snail than look at a single bill, so I just let her handle it. And so a year and more has gone by with us paying an insane amount of money for satellite tv, just because each assumed the other knew what the hell was going on.

DirecTV has assured me that I will be paid back for this, but they haven't yet figured out if it's going to be a huge credit on my bill (and thus "free" service for the next however long), or a check for a refund. I'll find that out this weekend.

I feel like a tard. Needless to say, we're auditing every single bill we get now (which, thankfully, are only our mortgage and services like tv, water, and whatnot).

* * *

(Permalink)