1. Phone Hold Music Ethics. DirecTV, which has bedeviled me, annoyed me and frustrated me for 30 years, had, all during that time, the worst on-hold music in human history. It was a scratchy recording of a high-pitched flute repeating the same unresolved bars over and over again. This selection was particularly crazy-making when DirecTV would, as was their wont, keep me waiting for ten minutes or more after telling me my wait time would be “less than two minutes.” Today I had an occasion to call the service again, and, mirabile dictu, the hold music is now a clear, crisp piano composition by Schubert. Small victories is all I have these days…
2. More DirecTV…For weeks I have been getting robo calls from DirecTV telling me to call a phone number. Sometimes I would get ten such calls a day. As a matter of principle, I refuse to continue robocalls or the new AI calls in which a female voice begins with “Hello?” so I hang up, sometimes with a tart, “Bite me!” Finally I decided to call the number I had been getting ordered to call just to complain about being harassed. I then learned from the agent in Bangladesh or somewhere that because I had set some kind of record for legitimate complaints over the past six months (loss of signal, interruption in service, installment of equipment, incompetent agents, etc, etc.) I was receiving a special promotion to keep me from ditching the service like so many other subscribers apparently are. It will save me about 50 bucks a month for two years, so I’m not complaining. At least for now.
Ethics Alarms 
Direct TV wanting a gift card sounds like a scam. I would be careful.
Came to say the same thing! This gift card business sounds very sketchy.
At a minimum, try calling from a number on your bill or their website to confirm this is legitimate.
FYI: Direct TV & Apple Promotional Offer | DIRECTV Community Forums; apparently the scammers call direct TV in the background to get your information to make it seem more legitimate.
100% scam. I wouldn’t waste my time any further on it.
Also, a warning for Jack and others: my understanding is AI is so advanced now that after just 3 seconds of hearing your voice, they can replicate it fairly accurately. Do not interact with these callers, at all.
Any call I’m unsure of I’ll answer with a gruff ” ‘lo”. One syllable, nothing more. At the first hint of spam, which is usually when I hear that distinctive tone telling me the call is being transferred from robocall to live 3rd world agent, I’m gone. Even that’s probably too much.
Exactly, the Apple Gift card scam is very well-known.
Yet, people fall for it.
Don’t fall for it, Jack.
-Jut
Even Apple opposes the scam: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120933
-Jut
It is illegal to do it fraudulently, but caller ID is based on early 1990’s phone technology, when people were naively trusting and security measures were not considered. In today’s age, spoofing a caller ID is trivial.
Companies are trying to retroactively adapt caller ID to have stricter security measures, but it will cause some the function to stop working on older landline phones, mostly directly hurting the older population more likely to have a landline phone. So the uprade process is stalling out.