The Real-Life Corporations of "The East": Directv

For the Grapes of Wrath action project, I decided to contact DirecTV. My parents and I had actually been having problems with our DirecTV bill for the past few months. So, by using them in the action project, I was hoping to possibly resolve our billing issue in the process of getting in touch with a high ranking official at the DirecTV office.

Back in December, Directv charged a subscription of Cinemax to our bill that we did not request. When my mother, who handles our bills and financial matters, called to ask why and how the extra fee was put on our bill, the Directv employee on the other end said that we simply "did not understand your billing statement". When she asked then if the employee on the phone could explain anything that she wouldn't have understood they did nothing except restate information that was clearly already understood by both parties. Since we did not pay for the Cinemax that was wrongly included on our bill, we received late fees on the monthly bills that followed, up until March. Right before the action project was introduced to me, my mother decided to simply “bite the bullet” and pay for the few months of Cinemax that Directv had charged us for. A few weeks ago, when I had the opportunity to take action, I decided to call the company once again.

Since my problem and issue was rooted in the billing department, I decided to call the number on one of the incorrect bills we had received in one of the months past. Similar to the experience that my mom had, I spoke (with great difficulty, because none of the phone operators spoke very good English) to a woman who merely kept repeating Directv’s billing statement and process to me. After further trying to explain my issue and asking if I could speak to someone who could help me more directly, my call was transferred. I then talked to a woman who I assumed to be in charge of the billing and that type of business. She had attitude with me right from the start and acted like she couldn’t have cared less about the issue with my bill. After a few minutes of back and forth discussion about my billing problem, she gave me a less than sufficient answer, almost her way of beating around the bush instead of coming right out and saying “Well I don’t know what you want me to do about it”, or something along those lines. Finally, before ending our conversation, she said the most they could do was “credit our account” for the late fees we paid on the Cinemax.

The incorrect charges on our bill were never fully resolved, and our account has yet to be “credited”. As a final step, I decided to go one step further. I looked up the name of the CEO of Directv on their very own website. While doing this, I also learned that the last woman I spoke to must have been Ellen Filipiak, the Senior VP of Customer Care. After getting the CEO's email address, I sent him an email describing all of the above issues. After spending much time, patience, and care on the email, I sent it out only to be promptly returned with a “postmaster delivery failure notice”. The email address of the CEO, Michael White, provided by the company itself is either incorrect or out of date. I googled Mr. White in hopes of finding more information and an alternate email address, but was unsuccessful. I did, however, find a discussion board of other unhappy Directv customers trying to email Mr. White as well! It seems that he doesn’t want to speak to the “average” people who are being inconvenienced by his poorly organized company.

On that note, this real life situation shows a striking resemblance to the Grapes of Wrath novel, with Mr. White being “the East”. Both seem to be unbothered by the unhappy and inconvenienced people that their actions, or lack thereof, are the result of. My situation specifically reminds me of the family in one of the early chapters of the novel who speak to the driver of the tractor who demolishes their house, just less severe. The tractor driver is simply doing his job, much like the phone operators at Directv that I first spoke to. I was obviously angry at them at first, but then realized that there is a much bigger entity to blame.

In conclusion, I now think I know why Mr. Currin assigned us this task. It was to get us to see that the issues that we are reading about in a fictional novel that was written several years ago are very much relevant to things that are still happening in society today.