Occasionally, companies that irritate the heck out of SC get extremely unfavorable comments here, even though technically it's way off-topic. But it's your host's blog, and he'll rant if he wants to. (Apologies to Lesley Gore.)
Today, it's DirecTV's turn. DirecTV has previously been on notice for their intrusive telemarketing behavior, but now they've crossed a line.
First, some background. All but the most casual observers have figured out by now that SC is originally from San Diego, a fact which explains his otherwise wholly mysterious attachments to losers who at least try to get better and heartless, gutless losers who could care less (today's results notwithstanding).
Being determined to get away from home, your host made it an entire 100 miles out of San Diego to go to college, following which he went right back there to work, culminating in a move to Orange County. San Diego's Jack Murphy Stadium (SC will not refer to it by its stock ticker symbol) is within 100 miles of his present location. For this reason, he is able to maintain his status as a season ticket-holder without undue hardship.
Today, however, he chose to give away his ticket for personal reasons. Your host expected that this would not interfere with his ability to watch the game, based on his aforementioned DirecTV subscription. More to the point, the pricey NFL Sunday Ticket subscription which he purchased for this exact purpose.
Now, a word of explanation is in order about the NFL's TV viewing rules. The league -- sensibly and legitimately, in SC's view -- prohibits the broadcasting of home games in local markets when the games are not sold out. This strikes SC as fair -- if you want to watch the game, it's not far from you, and tickets are available, it's a bit unseemly to complain that you couldn't get it for free. The team is in business to make money, after all.
However, according to DirecTV, SC is in the local market...for Los Angeles. This means that his local channels are KCBS, KABC, KNBC, and the rest of the channels which originate in L.A., rather than the equivalent San Diego-area network affiliates, KFMB, KGTV and KNSD. This further means that the CBS affiliate he gets thinks that his "home team" is the accursed Oakland Raiders. Yes, a Northern California team. SC is not terribly interested in hearing about how they have a substantial felon fan base in "Greater Los Angeles", they never played in Orange County, and they are not now located anywhere near here. The practical result of DirecTV's decision to classify SC as an L.A.-area resident is that he must buy Sunday Ticket in order to see any Chargers away games, because the CBS affiliate won't run them except on weekends where cocaine-snorting network executives mistakenly pick them as being of "national interest". Needless to say, with no winning records since 1995, this doesn't happen very often.
Today, the Chargers failed to sell out their stadium, an issue which has not occurred for contractual reasons in several years (the city guaranteed sellouts to the team for several years, a fact which only partially explains their dismal record). SC was shocked when it turned out that this meant that he couldn't get the Chargers game, because he's considered to be in the team's "local market". This "local market" for a San Diego-based team is considered to extend all the way to the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the Raiders used to play, and all the way up to the border of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. If you're in Santa Barbara, you're not considered to be in San Diego, but you are if you live anyplace short of that.
So from DirecTV's standpoint, SC lives in Los Angeles when it creates revenue for them, and lives in San Diego when they couldn't receive any benefit from it. For some reason, the operator who received SC's call to complain couldn't understand why he considered this ridiculous.
This prompted some research on SC's part, using the Sunday Ticket site's tool for looking up local market boundaries by ZIP code, as well as the U.S. Post Office's ZIP code lookup tool. It turns out that there are even more unfair situations than this -- in particular, if you're a resident of Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, D.C., in which case you can't receive any of their home games that don't sell out, even though a fan in any one of those cities isn't likely to be a ticket buyer in either of the other two. But the rules are rather inconsistent on the subject of distance; Pittsburgh is only 133 miles from Cleveland (by having Yahoo map city center to city center), and yet it's not considered part of Browns' territory, nor is Cleveland part of Steelers' territory. The L.A. Coliseum is only 10 miles less from Jack Murphy stadium, and yet L.A. is part of San Diego for TV purposes. SC never thought he'd say it but...come back, Raiders!
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