What the hell's wrong with Sirius Satellite Radio??!

The BBQ Pit
1

God dammit, I’ve had it with this stupid thing. I’ve had Sirius Satellite Radio for maybe 3 years now, and I just cannot get their billing and customer service people to make my account work.

Every couple months I get another yellow cutoff notice or have their automatic dialing system call me during dinner to complain about nonpayment.

I send them checks. I debit my VISA over the phone. I enable them to do direct debiting. I pay at the website. I speak with polite people on the phone. Every damn time, they tell me, OK, everything’s fixed now. And a couple months later the whole thing starts over again.

I must have about 20 different companies sending me bills, and every other one manages it just fine. They send a bill, I pay it, and when the next period rolls around we dance again. Never a problem.

A month ago they called me at 9:00 at night, to say my account was about to be shut off for nonpayment. So I asked for details, and they say, we can’t discuss it, the computer’s down. Then they ask if I can make a payment. I say, yes, if you need one, and they say sorry they can’t do that either, because the computer’s down. So I ask why they are calling people if they can’t transact anything with them, and they say it’s an automatic dialing system that they can’t shut down. Then they ask me if there’s anything else they can help me with.

So a couple days later I get another shutoff notice and go to the website this time, and it shows I have to make another year’s payment, so I do, and I get confirmation it worked, and my bank shows the debit.

Now I have just opened another cutoff notice received today.

What the hell is wrong with these people??? They can use rocket ships to deliver their product. Why can’t they collect my damn money like a normal business???

I mean, I like the product OK, but I’ve about had it with all these hassles. I want to move to their competition.

2

They automatically charge my debit card every month - no problems at all. I don’t even have to do anything. In fact, I have a six month membership for one of the receivers so no headaches at all there.

3

>They automatically charge my debit card every month - no problems at all.

Yeah, we set that up more than a year ago, and they promised everything would work right from now on. Beats me why it doesn’t, but it hasn’t yet. What’s your secret?

4

Sorry for your headache. Mine works great just like Caricci.

5

Funny, I’ve never had any problems with my satellite radio.

Oh, wait. That’s right…I’ve got XM. :smiley:

6

I’ve never had any billing problems with XM. Come on in. The water’s fine.

7

Another happy Sirius customer with no billing issues.

But then again, I got the lifetime membership…

Sorry, no help for the OP though.

8

Never had any problems with Sirius billing. They charge my debit card every month, and it’s all good.

The lack of updates for channel names, though, is truly pitworthy. Sirius Disorder is still labeled as “Jazz Central” or something like that, months after it was moved to a new channel.

9

That’s a great line.

10

I haven’t had any billing problems with Sirius, either. And I’m not sure you’d need to actually move to XM, as there is talk of Sirius and XM merging (the FCC needs to approve it). So you might end up with XM anyway (the FCC request says that the new company would keep the XM name). I guess the real question is whose billing people we’ll end up getting!

11

Christ, I hope we get to keep Sirius’ Broadway channel. XM’s Broadway channel sucks donkey balls. (Sirius is repetitive, but XM’s is just odd.)

12

I don’t have any billing problems either since I’m on year-to-year, but FUCK the number of signal drops I get is astounding. I don’t know if this is an issue with my car (it’s a Dodge), or with Sirius but it is very annoying. Driving under a bridge and losing signal is something I can understand, but dropping the signal every time I pull in my driveway because, I assume, of the fucking oak tree in my front yard?!?! WHY? WHY DO YOU DO THAT? You work seamlessly while I’m in the parking garage at work. Do I have a magic signal-blocking oak leaves. Is the elves’ baking apparatus interfering with the signal? Why? Why? Why?

Also, does Sirius have what could be described as a Clearchannel lineup-type station? For those of you who are exposed to both, I’m thinking of something like XM’s Flight 26, XM 20, or Hits (although, if I’m rembering right, Hits skews a little too hip hop/urban for my tastes). Sirius’ channel 9 should be similar, but it is not quite right.

13

I’m not laughing at your plight, I do truly feel bad about how frustrating this must be for you but what’s quoted is just so ridiculous, so darn absurd that it’s almost comical.

In your situation I’d take great delight in calling Sirius to give them the date your service will be switching to XM. I can’t imagine any programming being worth this much grief and frustration.

14

>so darn absurd that it’s almost comical

Yeah, well, that’s the thing. I think it IS funny, especially the guy calling me to say he can’t conduct any business with me. I guess he HAS to ask if there is anything else he can help me with. It’s some poor guy sitting there making 5 calls a minute with some computer keeping his queue full of people it has just disturbed. And he has some sheet of prattle he has to read out loud whether it makes sense or not. And in spite of myself, I can’t help but be exasperated with him, because he’s a living thinking conscious being and he’s also being paid to pretend he’s living and thinking and conscious on behalf of a weird modern entity that is none of those, which will fire his pathetic ass if he doesn’t ask if he can help me with anything else. And if his life and thought and consciousness break through after God only knows how many days of doing this, and he cries out to me, “Sorry sir but I have to try to help you not do anything because Sirius is as dumb as toast” - well, then, some supervisor will point him out on his stool, number 87 in row 12, and two overseers will walk over to him and escort him out into the glaring Bangalore morning sun, and he will have to walk home and explain to his family why they may need to move again. And it’ll be my fault.

15

It might be the antenna. Apparently some of the older ones can get damaged by water and start to go haywire. I replaced mine and it seemed to clear it up.

16

I get Howard Stern on Sirius and, although my receiver stays in the same goddamn window, inside the house, and doesn’t move, there’s a lot of static at random times and radio fade-outs which annoy the hell out of me. What is it, solar wind? Give me a break!

Never had any problems with billing, though.

17

What I’ve noticed with my car unit is, it’s getting harder to find an FM signal to transmit to, but that’s not Sirius’s fault. It just seems as if there are more strong FM stations lately. Go figure.

At work I carry the same receiver from its car dock to its home dock and connect to a little stereo rather than transmit the signal since, when I upgraded to a Sportster 4, I couldn’t transmit it anymore and it works great. I’m in a semi-basement office with no window to the outside and still get a fine signal.

I have it for Stern too.

18

I have had minor hassles with foliage and finding clear FM channels and the like. Especially, it troubles me that I probably have 200 dropouts on my commute because so much of it is under big trees.

Oddly enough, almost the only thing I listen to on Sirius is NPR (National Public Radio). I can’t do this on FM because in my area there are only two NPR stations, and they both occupy the same FM channel, so the radio flutters uselessly between the two when it’s set there, and just makes a fft-fft-fft noise. In fact, perhaps a third of the FM channels are occupied by two stations around here (a rural area midway between two fairly big cities and also midway between two very big but more distant cities).

19

I’ve noticed this a lot. We seem to have a ton of small stations in the 80s and low 90s around here. Plus, my office is right next to a small Catholic radio station with a broadcast tower, which I think screws up my reception in this area. Around home and once I get a half mile past the tower, I’m usually good at 91.3 or 91.7. But it’s damn near impossible to find a lower frequency.

(My husband uses his tape deck to transmit, and I’m jealous because he gets perfect sound out of his.)

20

They have a frequency suggestion tool on sirius.com. Put in your zip code and they’ll tell you what frequencies are likely to be uncongested in your area.

Enjoy,
Steven