A match not so heavenly for her

Dan Thanh Dang | Consuming Interests

May 11, 2008

A marriage of convenience can be richly rewarding, and a bit risky.

In the case of Verizon Communications and DirecTV, the benefit of the smart union between two seeming rivals was clear. Verizon got to aggressively compete against Comcast's Triple Play phone, Internet and TV service offer even as the telecom continued to build its fiber-optic TV network. DirecTV got instant access to however many of Verizon's 40 million land-line customers were fed up with cable and don't have fiber installed in their neighborhoods yet.

Sounds like a match made in heaven, right? Not for Fawn Hartline, who jumped at Verizon's $104-a-month triple play offer in December.

"They didn't have FiOS TV available in our neighborhood yet," the Parkville resident said. "If we wanted phone and DSL service at a good price we had to go with DirecTV, so we signed up."

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Hartline said a DirecTV subcontractor showed up on Dec. 9 to install the dish and multiple receivers.

But when the technician left, Hartline said, she discovered that the dish was hanging haphazardly off her roof and wires were dangling from the side of her home and inside her basement.

"I called that same day to complain," Hartline said. "They sent another technician out on the 17th. It was a snowy day. He went around the house and told me the wiring wasn't grounded. Then he gave me his number and a number to call tech support and have it installed properly. I don't know why he didn't fix the problem, but he left.

"So I called tech support that same day," Hartline said. "They asked me why [the tech] didn't fix it. I told them I had called him after he left and he said he couldn't come back because he had too many emergency calls. I told them the picture was still not working. They told me to wait for him to file his report."

Hartline called DirecTV the next day and they made another appointment to send techs to her house on Dec. 19. No one showed, she said. Two more appointments were made, Hartline said, and both were no-shows.

By Dec. 28, she had had it. She called DirecTV to cancel "a service I never properly received." Once DirecTV picked up their equipment, she thought her problems were over.

But in February, Hartline opened her mail to find a DirecTV statement billing her $366.96 for an early cancellation fee, minus credits for returned equipment, premium channels and such.

"My husband went mad," Hartline said. "He told them he would sooner pay a lawyer than pay a bill after they endangered us with a bad installation and after the no-shows and after we had no service to show for it from day one. I called Verizon, but they said I had to call DirecTV."

DirecTV responded by sending the Hartline bill to collection.

"The calls started at the end of March," Hartline said. "They called me five times a day and threatened to destroy our credit report. I was sick over it. My husband was sick over it." Feeling cornered and bullied, Hartline said she called the collection agency on May 1 to arrange payment, even though she felt she did not owe the debt.

"I didn't know what else to do," Hartline said.

First, let's note that as someone who works as a finance manager for a living, Hartline should know better.

When you agree to pay a collection agency for a debt that is not yours, you're taking ownership of that debt. Once you do that, you've boxed yourself in. Instead of knuckling under, Hartline should have reported the company to the Federal Trade Commission or the attorney general's office.

Hartline's side of the story was also made difficult by the fact that she had no paperwork or work order from the technician to document that he had, in fact, shown up at her home.

Luckily, we still had time to reverse her errors.

The thing about partnerships is that when your partner does good work, you benefit from that good. The risky part is that when your partner does bad work, your rep gets sullied as well.