More like indirect TV

What does ordering DirecTV have to do with renting an apartment in the former Communist Hungary?

Bear with me.

According to a cousin, here was how you could rent an apartment in Budapest under communism: First, you had to buy a condominium. This sounded like the setup of a Marx Brothers routine. Why not just rent an apartment, I asked. You couldn’t, said my cousin. You had to buy a condo, then exchange it for someone’s rented apartment, the swap subject to the approval of the municipal authorities.

Ah, bureaucracy, Soviet style. Here in America, we pride ourselves on the notion of boundless consumer choice, but also here in America, choice comes to the person who is first able to navigate the autocratic institutions that guard choice.

What am I trying to say? I wanted to order DirecTV. For a living, I was going to be watching more television, and I had decided that this was a way to get out from under Comcast, my local cable provider/FCC-protected autocracy, by exercising my God-given right to take my business to another company that would be happy to have me.

None of this promised to be easy. I think there was a time in history when you bought a television, plugged it in and watched. Now you must decide whether or not it’s worth paying an extra 40 bucks for nine Showtimes and seven HBOs (Ray Liotta has a surprisingly vast oeuvre) and a Gay TV network to go along with all the straight ones. More philosophically, thanks to the contraption known as TiVo, there is the issue of how you want to manipulate the viewing experience. Do you want to let the vastness wash over you or take a more proactive approach via digital video recording equipment that means never having to see a commercial again?

DirecTV, I was convinced, would welcome me into its bosom. After all, I wanted everything. The TV equivalent of “till death do us part” -- the Total Choice Premiere Package, as it’s called, with its 200-plus channels, its nine Showtimes and seven HBOs and, for all I knew, a camera perched on a mountain somewhere on the Pakistani-Afghan border, called the Where’s Osama Channel.

I should say here that I am not blameless in the quagmire that ensued. First of all, I tried calling DirecTV rather than ordering online -- my first mistake. Then I had to hang up in the middle of the call and decided to call back and cancel the order. I figured that since I had to buy a TiVo anyway (what if Osama showed up at 3 in the morning and I was asleep?), I would buy the machine at Good Guys, remembering that a salesman had once told me they could order DirecTV for me. This process would also involve human-to-human contact.

I had a lot to learn. At Good Guys, a different salesman advised me to do the whole thing through DirecTV. “It’s just easier,” he said, “to get it all from them.” Later I regretted not clinging to his pant leg and whimpering, “Help me.” So I called DirecTV back. The salesperson’s name was Desire. I complimented her on the name. Desire wanted my Social Security number, my phone number, my credit card number. She wanted to know if I would approve a credit check. I had gone through this process once already and now reaffirmed that, when it came to DirecTV, I had nothing to hide.

Then she took my order. She used phrases unfamiliar to me, like “standard machine.” She seemed fond of this term. Concerned, I began blurting out “TiVo.” Was TiVo the same as standard machine? I believe we had a five-minute call-and-response exchange that sounded something like this:

Desire: “You’d like a standard machine.

Me: “TiVo.”

Desire: “Standard machine.”

Me: “Standard machine?”

Desire: “Standard machine.”

Me: “Is that what I want?”

Desire: “You’d like a standard machine?”

Me: “Is it too late to change my answer to TiVo?”

By the end of it, Desire and I concluded that what she had ordered for me was not what I wanted. So I asked her to change the order to include TiVo, or what DirecTV calls DVR, for digital video recorder. She said she couldn’t. She said, chillingly, that I was going to have to call the Customer Support Hotline and cancel the order, then call back and reorder. I begged her not to do this to me, to us. She wisely put a supervisor on the phone.

I would love to get a tape of the conversation I had with this supervisor, because I emoted infinitely more than I ever do in actual life. Through the phone, he escorted me to a customer support line, where someone named Will or Wes informed me that I was going to have to wait for the Desire-assisted wrong order to wend its way through their computer system before I could call back and cancel it. He advised trying back that night.

Five days later the DirecTV installer arrived and bolted the satellite dish to the side of my house. He set up the DVR. Then he called DirecTV to activate my service. That’s when he handed me the phone and I was informed that, because they had conducted three separate credit checks during the whole order-cancellation-reorder portion of our relationship, I was going to have to fax them a copy of my driver’s license and a copy of a utility bill to ensure that nobody else in my house was madly ordering the service. But two of the credit checks were the result of the botched order with Desire, I tried to explain, and now there’s a dish on my house and I have to check on Osama.

I might as well have been in Budapest in 1975, trying to find a studio near the Danube. The woman on the phone told me to fax them the documentation. DirecTV, she said, would get back to me in approximately seven days.

In the meantime, just in case, I put out feelers for a condominium.