Meg: 1 Vivint: 0

With this new house, came an already installed Vivint alarm system…That talked to you… Every time you opened a door or window. 

And as sweet as that may sound, the novelty wears off shortly when you’re moving and every time you open the door to the garage, a British woman yells “GARAGE DOOR OPEN” from a box on the wall. 

But it was already installed, it had a swanky keypad and I could change the voice commands to a sultry, foreign-sounding man’s voice. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Vivint ropes you in pretty quickly. Their sales associates are over-the-top friendly and have so much enthusiasm when explaining motion detectors, it borders on unnerving. But it seemed a pretty good enough deal (naive first-home-buyer, here) and they could install next week. So I payed the install fee and scheduled my appointment for the technician to come out and work with the foreign-voiced man that lived in the keypad in my foyer. 

I expected to get a receipt for my payment via email within a few minutes, but it never came. Three hours later and it still was a no-show. I called back the customer service line and discovered that Tanner, the overly enthusiastic salesman, had incorrectly entered my last name (and subsequently my email address) to Medsord. MEDSORD.

Oh well, easy mistake I’m sure. I have the voice of an eleven-year-old girl on the phone, and it throws people off. I assumed they could re-send my receipt to correct email address. 

Funny enough, no one at Vivint really knows how to do anything except sell you on their love for motion detectors. I was bounced around from department to department, from manager to manager and no one had a clue how to work their own system. I never got the same answer or resolution to my request from the twenty plus people that I spoke to. My favorite response by far was, “We can re-send you a receipt, but it’ll cost you $1.00”. In which I replied, “Oh okay, but only if I can get a receipt for that too.” They didn’t think that was very funny.

So I took my complaints to Facebook (the one way to get their attention is via bad social media publicity) and immediately received an overwhelmingly apologetic response about my frustrations. Now that I had two open lines of communication, I decided that if it takes them this long and I go through this much trouble to send me a receipt, I probably shouldn’t trust them to guard my home.

So I went into cancelling my account - which launched into another round of ten customer service calls, threats to report them to the BBB (I don’t even know how to do that), and to disgrace their name all over the internet (lol).

I was just about to give up on ever seeing my $152.99 ever again - chalking it up to my karma payment (with interest) for never delivering that pre-paid Girl Scout cookie order to my neighbor when I was seven. 

But the alarm system gods must have been pleased with my sacrificial offering last week, because lo and behold, the skies opened yesterday and a $153.99 refund was granted. (Note the extra $1.00 they actually did charge me.)

I never did received a receipt for that $1.00 payment, but I think that’s another battle for another day.