I Am The Only Person In the World Who This Has Happened To

In the neverending DirectTV / Cingular saga, I decided yesterday that instead of jumping the gun and immediately buying a new phone to rectify the sudden lack of cell phone reception in my apartment, I would make some phone calls from work to figure out what my options were.

Phone Call 1: called Cingular. The college kid on the phone thought my complaint was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He believed me, though. He was joking with me and said that my cell phone was acting out because it wasn't getting as much attention anymore now that I have TV. He said they would send me a new phone in the mail, but then realized he couldn't because I've had my phone for over a year. Curses. He said "I will put you in touch with Samsung and see what they can do."

Phone Call 2: called Samsung. This guy was very helpful but hadn't heard of DirectTV interfering with a cell phone. He did understand, though, about how my phone runs interference with electronics on a regular basis and gave me some tips. He tried to change a setting on my phone, but couldn't because my phone was set up in such a way that made the change impossible. He suggested that I call DirectTV and ask them to put "a filter" on the incoming signal.

Phone call 3: called DirectTV. This guy was a bastard. He totally didn't believe me and kept saying, really slowly, "I've never heard of anyone having a problem with their cell phone because of DirectTV." I said "Look, I don't know if its really the problem, but I'm just wondering if you can put a filter on the signal." He said he'd never heard of filters, and basically told me I was an idiot. The only useful thing he said was "Have you unplugged the receiver to see if you get signal?"

Uhhh.... no.

Hadn't done that. It had occurred to me to do that over the weekend, but I didn't because (a) I was concerned that unhooking the receiver would somehow obliterate DirectTV and given the drama it took to install it I didn't want to risk it and (b) I completely forgot.

Last night when I got home from work I unplugged the DirectTV receiver and instantly had 5 bars on my phone. Wtf? Granted, reception in the apartment wasn't as good as it was before, but unplugging it did have an affect on my phone.

So now I am torn, because I think my only option is to unplug the receiver whenever I want to use my cell phone. The good news it that the landline is installed, so I can take calls on it. But I can't make calls on it, because we are cheap and don't have long distance. But I don't want to opt out of my Cingular contract (money I don't have! and a pain in ass) and I don't want to opt out of the DirectTV contract (money I don't have as well as scheduling and surviving another cable installation which I just don't want to do).

And I don't know if I should call DirectTV back and be like "Fyi - I did my experiment and lo and behold you're freaking receiver interferes with my cell phone, bastards!"