Digital Home Thoughts: Circuit City - Never Again!

Tech Visit 1:
They sent over a certified Sony tech, who did not speak any English. He came and thought the problem was with some settings. Using the TV remote, he messed with the settings for several minutes but after he couldn't fix it, he basically said that there was nothing wrong with the TV. Ultimately he said that he couldn't see anything wrong with the picture quality. I was a bit surprised but I asked if I could get the TV replaced if the problem persisted and he said he would see what he could do but I would have to ultimately call up CC. I was very confused by this visit but I signed the receipt that he presented acknoledging that he had indeed come and looked at the TV. This was in March.


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Tech Visit 2:
Since I was completely dissatisfied with this tech and did not hear from either him or CC for about 2 weeks, I called CC tech support again. They said that the previous tech reported that there was nothing wrong with the TV (which I found to be a blatant lie) but since I claimed that the problem still existed, they decided to send someone else. Note also that everytime a tech needs to be sent, I call CC, who then takes about 5 days to schedule a call back from a tech shop who then take at least 2 weeks to show up. Anyways, they sent over a second tech company who immediately acknowledged that there was a problem with the TV and after looking at it for a few minutes decided that it needed to be taken to the shop.

I was fine with this as it was at least progress from my point of view that the problem was being looked at. When I did not hear from them for a week, I called the shop up who said that the tech who came and looked at my TV (and had acknowledged the problem) only worked on the field and the in-store techs could not find anything wrong with the TV. I asked if I could come in and look at it and they had no problem with it. When I went over to the store I saw the same problem. First they claimed that there was nothing wrong, and then they claimed that the problem was with their own cable line and not the TV. I asked them how they repaired any TV at all with a faulty cable which they found very offensive because that was their trust cable connection that had lasted over (apparently) 25 years. They basically said they would do nothing further and that they would return my TV. I asked them if they could arrange for me to get a replacement TV and they said that it was out of the question since it worked fine. They returned the TV, again having me sign a receipt claiming that they had come and looked at my TV. I did this again and when I asked for a copy of the receipt, they said that it was only for internal purposes and if I wanted to get a final report of their work, I would have to contact CC directly. They also said, shockingly, that it was probably the Empire State Building's antenna intereference that was causing all this. This was in May.

I called up CC a week later to figure out the status of the problem and they said that they now had two techs who had told them that there was nothing wrong with the TV and that there was nothing they could do about it and that they were closing the case. I told them that the second tech store acknowledged the problem but CC said that I had signed a receipt accepting that there was nothing wrong with the TV. And this is when it dawned upon me that the receipts I was signing were not only acknowledgements of the work but also the report that was usually written in a blank note section that I had never really noticed before. So I was signing the receipts which were then filled in with data that was false and sent to CC. I explained all of this to them but they were extremely unsympathetic. I asked them if they could replace my TV and they said no. I asked if they would buy it back for the current market value (a loss of almost $700 for me) and I would buy a new TV and pay the difference in cost and they did not want to even listen to that suggestion. This was June.


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I was so frustrated that I called Sony directly and talked to their tech support and even though they found the problem to be very odd, they said that Sony had no way to help me since I had not bought Sony support. I did have the option of shipping the TV to and from Pennsylvania (shipping itself would costing a fortune) and having it looked at by the authorized US Sony center at a cost of $200 (I don't remember the exact amount but it was in that range) and that might help but the cost was too great for me. So according to Sony I was to call CC again.

Since I was so fed up with CC, I decided to call Time Warner Cable again hoping against hope that the problem was not my TV but the cable connection. They rapidly, over the course of three months, dispatched several technicians who once again replaced more or less all the cabling and equipment in my apartment but that did not help. When I told them of the CC tech's suggestion that it was intereference from the Empire State, they even checked for that and eliminated that as a source of the problem. Finally, they placed a call to the Time Warner people that work with cabling down in the sewers who checked signal strength and quality and reported that everything was fine. We cheked my neighbors' picture quality and no one else had a problem. I even found several of my neighbors to have Sony Wega (one of whom had the exact model as me) and no one else had any problems with reception. The final Time Warner tech that came to my apartment told me that he was a CC/Sony TV repairman some time ago and had quit because he did not generally like the way they treated their customers (no idea whether this is true), but he wrote a letter guaranteeing that there was nothing wrong with the cable equipment. He also told me that CC makes it very clear to their techs that they are not to, under any circumstances, tell the customers that the problem cannot be fixed because that would mean that CC was responsible for replacing the device. All this ended in Fall/October.

I was completely fed up and decided that I was screwed so I let the whole thing lie for about two months.