Definitely some of my best work tonight, and I know that my efforts left a mark on both the telemonkey and her equally daft supervisor.
For those that haven’t experienced SiriusXM’s war machine, they give you a low 6 month introductory offer then jack up the price with an automatic renewal unless you cancel in writing at least 10 days in advance of the expiration date. They claim they never received your cancellation, and the situation devolves into a fight with SiriusXM and your credit card company to not only cancel what you already tried to cancel but to be reimbursed for the cost of what you didn’t want to buy in the first place.
Never give SiriusXM your credit card.
If you do successfully manage to cancel your subscription, or it just expires like with a 3 or 6 month promo offer that comes with a new vehicle, they wage a campaign of mail and phone call bombardment intended to beat you into submission. I’d thought I’d fought them off since my promo on my new truck expired in January. They called several times a day, 50+ pieces of mail, and had gotten me riled up to the point of yelling at em several times. Then they quit calling for almost two months, and I thought I’d won...until tonight.
They switched to a local call center based out of Arcola, TX (281-915-0649) for those that want to put em on a block list. I knew better when I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered. Bam!, I instantly knew they’d got me. This time they offered the 6 month promo price plus streaming for free. Not bad, and really the streaming is what I wanted, but given the pain and suffering they put me through, I figured I’d squeeze a little more out of them.
I asked what all the different promotions available were, and got a sigh from the telemonkey. She ran through them all, and after putting on my best podunk hick voice, I asked if I could do “one a them mixy matchy thangs where I takes a little of this’n and some a that’n ta fix up a nice deal, a real nice deal”. She asked what I meant, and I said I thought it would be nice to get an Amazon Echo Dot for free so that I could take it with me and listen to it in my truck (even though they were calling to renew the subscription for my truck’s radio).
That earned me the supervisor. The game of checkers had now become chess. The supervisor was far more skilled and quickly cornered me into a situation where I needed to provide the payment method they could use after activating my truck radio right while we were on the phone. I castled my king and said “now just hang on here a minute. We got this Sirius bidness in my wife’s van, will my deal work in her car too?”
This opened the door to twice the number of frustrating ignorant questions I could throw at her. We went back and forth on the different plans, our two vehicles, streaming, “exactly how does that Echo Dot thing work anyhow?”, sharing one plan between two vehicles, family discounts, and why I needed the NFL channels on account of how I like to switch between the different broadcasts of the same NFL football game “to try and see if one team is cheating”.
About 40 minutes into the call, the supervisor was clearly angry but still maintaining the facade of customer service. Only, she wasn’t customer service, she was supposedly in the sales department and was offering deals that the customer service department wasn’t allowed to know about. “Well, let’s call em customer service folks up, and y’all can compete for the best deal, and I’ll take whoever wins”. Can’t do that. “Well can’t you just go get them. I mean where I work if we needs a person we just go down the hall and gets em.” I think the supervisor might’ve actually growled after I asked that one.
We went round and round. My truck, my wife’s van, was she sure we couldn’t just share one plan and use it during the week in my wife’s van and just on weekends in my truck. Can she help me cheat the system and instead let us stream to both vehicles from one account. It was awesome. Finally at an hour and 8 minutes she cracked and slipped that customer service could do anything we needed or wanted if we just got the subscription started now.
“Well, I’d love to, but my wife and I have a lot of responsibilititties and hafta be careful how we do our money. It don’t grow on trees, not round here anyways. Hell last year I had to use pea gravel in the deer feeder to cut down on corn cost.” Oh yes, it was glorious. She was so very frustrated and angry, and I was just full of curiosity and patience. I could hear her breathing into the phone from frustration as I just kept rolling along with things like how nice it would be if Sirius would offer a special channel that has Siri so you could ask it questions or if my wife and I could set up a channel where we talk to each other while we’re both driving.
I made it an hour and 22 minutes before she repeated the 1-888 customer service number three times back to back and hung up on me. I hope they made a note in our account that we’re idiots and may waste their time, or maybe they recorded the call for “quality assurance”.
Either way, I got one back on em, and it feels good.
**** ***, SiriusXM.
For those that haven’t experienced SiriusXM’s war machine, they give you a low 6 month introductory offer then jack up the price with an automatic renewal unless you cancel in writing at least 10 days in advance of the expiration date. They claim they never received your cancellation, and the situation devolves into a fight with SiriusXM and your credit card company to not only cancel what you already tried to cancel but to be reimbursed for the cost of what you didn’t want to buy in the first place.
Never give SiriusXM your credit card.
If you do successfully manage to cancel your subscription, or it just expires like with a 3 or 6 month promo offer that comes with a new vehicle, they wage a campaign of mail and phone call bombardment intended to beat you into submission. I’d thought I’d fought them off since my promo on my new truck expired in January. They called several times a day, 50+ pieces of mail, and had gotten me riled up to the point of yelling at em several times. Then they quit calling for almost two months, and I thought I’d won...until tonight.
They switched to a local call center based out of Arcola, TX (281-915-0649) for those that want to put em on a block list. I knew better when I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered. Bam!, I instantly knew they’d got me. This time they offered the 6 month promo price plus streaming for free. Not bad, and really the streaming is what I wanted, but given the pain and suffering they put me through, I figured I’d squeeze a little more out of them.
I asked what all the different promotions available were, and got a sigh from the telemonkey. She ran through them all, and after putting on my best podunk hick voice, I asked if I could do “one a them mixy matchy thangs where I takes a little of this’n and some a that’n ta fix up a nice deal, a real nice deal”. She asked what I meant, and I said I thought it would be nice to get an Amazon Echo Dot for free so that I could take it with me and listen to it in my truck (even though they were calling to renew the subscription for my truck’s radio).
That earned me the supervisor. The game of checkers had now become chess. The supervisor was far more skilled and quickly cornered me into a situation where I needed to provide the payment method they could use after activating my truck radio right while we were on the phone. I castled my king and said “now just hang on here a minute. We got this Sirius bidness in my wife’s van, will my deal work in her car too?”
This opened the door to twice the number of frustrating ignorant questions I could throw at her. We went back and forth on the different plans, our two vehicles, streaming, “exactly how does that Echo Dot thing work anyhow?”, sharing one plan between two vehicles, family discounts, and why I needed the NFL channels on account of how I like to switch between the different broadcasts of the same NFL football game “to try and see if one team is cheating”.
About 40 minutes into the call, the supervisor was clearly angry but still maintaining the facade of customer service. Only, she wasn’t customer service, she was supposedly in the sales department and was offering deals that the customer service department wasn’t allowed to know about. “Well, let’s call em customer service folks up, and y’all can compete for the best deal, and I’ll take whoever wins”. Can’t do that. “Well can’t you just go get them. I mean where I work if we needs a person we just go down the hall and gets em.” I think the supervisor might’ve actually growled after I asked that one.
We went round and round. My truck, my wife’s van, was she sure we couldn’t just share one plan and use it during the week in my wife’s van and just on weekends in my truck. Can she help me cheat the system and instead let us stream to both vehicles from one account. It was awesome. Finally at an hour and 8 minutes she cracked and slipped that customer service could do anything we needed or wanted if we just got the subscription started now.
“Well, I’d love to, but my wife and I have a lot of responsibilititties and hafta be careful how we do our money. It don’t grow on trees, not round here anyways. Hell last year I had to use pea gravel in the deer feeder to cut down on corn cost.” Oh yes, it was glorious. She was so very frustrated and angry, and I was just full of curiosity and patience. I could hear her breathing into the phone from frustration as I just kept rolling along with things like how nice it would be if Sirius would offer a special channel that has Siri so you could ask it questions or if my wife and I could set up a channel where we talk to each other while we’re both driving.
I made it an hour and 22 minutes before she repeated the 1-888 customer service number three times back to back and hung up on me. I hope they made a note in our account that we’re idiots and may waste their time, or maybe they recorded the call for “quality assurance”.
Either way, I got one back on em, and it feels good.
**** ***, SiriusXM.
I think I pay $14 a month for Siruis and it is worth every penny.
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