No Longer Activating HR-24's (or any HD-DVR)??

Hi everybody, here's the background. A few years ago I upgraded to an HR-44 Genie. I did not want the Genie Clients that went with the Genie and kept my other two HR-24's. This setup, with 9 tuners for recording, has worked great for me. I've had a couple HR-24's fail and they were always replaced no problem and the new ones continued to work fine in my setup.

Last Thursday the HDD in the HR-24 in our bedroom died. Called support (I have the protection plan as well) and after going thru the teeth pulling of the L1 tech from God knows what country, reading from his script, I finally get a replacement approved. We were on vacation this week and got home today so I installed the replacement HR-24 and then went to activate it. I tried the automated system and got a "system error" so I had to call them.

I got to a human pretty quickly and he tried to activate the HR-24 and was having all kinds of problems and had to "call in the sales team". After about 15 minutes of them trying and not succeeding to activate the HR-24 the guy tells me that the sales team just said it's an old receiver and they are no longer activating them! I'm like you idiots just sent me an HR-24, why would you do that if you can't activate it?? He said they just found out about this policy. I said that I also still have an HR-24 in another room and that is working fine, and he tells me that that one may not working in the future.

He then tells me I have two choices. I can get a Genie or a Genie Mini. That's it? They don't have stand alone HD DVR's anymore? He says he'll send me a Genie. I told him I already have a Genie and as far as I know you can only have one Genie on your account. He tells me no, that's changed. I said Ok send me another Genie. A minute later he comes back and says you're right, you can only have one Genie...so now my ONLY choice is to get a mini. No I'm apparently stuck so I say fine and he says a Tech has to come out to install it and the earliest appointment is AUGUST 11th!!! Are you f*&^$%# kidding me? A MONTH wait??

Support has screwed up every aspect of this issue, from telling me the wrong order numbers, to giving me a FedEx tracking number when the replacement DVR actually came by UPS, to the reps not knowing a damn thing about what they're talking about and changing their stories.

I'm a long time D* customer, from back when you could actually install the systems yourself, and I'm also a System Administrator and computer nerd, lol, so I have a pretty good idea how things work. I knew it was going to suck when AT&T took over but they just seem to be getting worse at every turn. I know that there are a bunch of knowledgeable people here and I'd appreciate any thoughts or insight on this. Is this really a new policy about not activating HD DVR's anymore (I did see one thread on another board about a week or so ago where somebody had the same problem, but there was not much info)??

Ok, long rant over, like I said we just got back from vacation today and this was not what I wanted to deal with, lol. Any thoughts are much appreciated!

Doug