I am reposting this in concert with my wee rant on KRCB with Bruce Robinson, please add your comments if you have any!
A wee bit ago I moved from a great old barn i was staying in and cancelled my Dish Network service . . . herin follows a description of a practice that abhors me!
To Whom!
I recently cancelled a television and internet contract with Dish Network . . . besides becoming a process akin to extracting teeth, there were a few disturbing extrapolations of the process . . . when one cancels their contract, it is incumbent upon the client to climb upon the roof, or wherever the dishes are located and indulge in some complicated maneuvering to extract the brains of the dish network while leaving the dishes wherever they may be . . . my first reaction to this was, what if the clients are 80 years old and cannot afford to hire someone to remove the desired parts . . . besides having to cancel my subscription multiple times, which has been a long and arduous journey worthy of it's own saga, the company will not take any responsibility for the dish apparatus themselves . . .
I was originally called with a recorded message telling me that it was incumbent upon my own self to return all of the companies equipment to them within a certain time period . . . I have packed all the materials in a 2' x 2' x 2' box but they will not accept any of the parts except the hard drives and receiving chips.
I have been told by three different representatives that I am to throw the perfectly good, one year old parts in the trash! while I was having this conversation on the office phone . . . part of the seven hours that I and my office manager have spent thrashing through this corporate nightmare, one of my clients waited til I hung up in frustration and mentioned that she and her husband had the same frustrations and difficulties but finally gave in to some semblance of compliance as life got in the way, and he is Dr. Rocky Rohwedder, professor of environmental studies at Sonoma State!
I run a re-use, re-purpose and recycle company and devote endless hours to trying to achieve zero waste and here is a company that finds it more efficient to ship newly manufactured materials in cartons from China to wherever and out to consumers and leave thousands of perfectly good equipment pieces littering the landscape daily!
I believe that we are two of thousands if not tens of thousands of people that are appalled by this approach! I am writing you in the hopes that we might draw attention to this very disturbing and wasteful manner of doing business.
In a country that has been striving to decrease it's already world record production of landfill, where the most oft spoke key word is green, where jobs could be had to resurface old dishes and re-use same and where we sully our once beautiful landscape daily with technical accoutrements including the hundreds (maybe thousands) of dishes left singing their ungainly, unsightly, disconnected woeful tune, it would be nice if we could make some sense of this behaviour!
