At the time that I ordered satellite TV from Direct Star TV, I was talked into accepting the offer of a free month of Sirius Satellite Radio. I say this as I hardly listened to the radio to begin with. Even before I received the equipment, I began receiving email reminders to activate the service. So as soon as I received it, I opened the box and called to activate since the emails stated to "activate today", and otherwise if I didn't activate by December 31, I would be charged a $50 non-activation fee. Not being familiar with satellite radios, I didn't know that it had to be installed on the vehicle to do this. I thought it was like a GPS unit that could be moved from one vehicle to another. (I went back through my emails — I overlooked the part of setting it up in the car before activating, which was on the very first email from Sirius). After three weeks after activating it in the second week of Jan and hardly listening to it, I decided to cancel the subscription. During the call, I had to enter my phone # and after 10 mins (I was using my cell phone and could see the timer), I was finally speaking to someone with a Latin American Spanish accent who again asked for my phone #, then my full name spelled out, address, and email address. I had to tell him three times to speak slowly as I was having difficulty understanding what he was saying. It seemed that not listening to it was not enough of a reason to cancel as he kept asking if the equipment or the reception wasn't up to par. Then he said he was transferring my call to have another person confirm the cancelation. When that person finally came on 6 minutes later, I had to again tell him the phone # and other information I had already previously given to the first person. Then I was a little upset when he mentioned that he had just talked to the other person (If the first person confirmed who I was, why go through it again?) and wanted to know if service or reception was the problem, he could fix it. I said no. Then he asked if I wanted an additional free month, then two, and then three. No, no, and no. I just wanted it canceled. He finally gave me my account # (for my record) and stated the reception would end on Feb 12. Thanks, goodbye. The whole process took just shy of 20 mins! During the extensive waiting periods, I was tempted to hang up but knew that this was probably one of the tactics used to have patrons stay on beyond the trial period, and I knew that if I hung up, I would still have to do this again on a later call.
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