Its Been a Buggy Week for the Sirius Stiletto 2
If you happen to be the owner of a Sirius Stiletto 2 you’ve probably spent the last week contemplating firing that little black brick out a window – the good news is, you’re not alone and we finally have a fix.
On Wednesday July 11th many Sirius subscribers awoke to find their radios “unsubscribed” and rendered useless in an event that SiriusXM customer service has described as an outage, update bug, and even a satellite malfunction. Whatever the real issue was, about 24 hours later the problem was seemingly fixed for everyone accept those faithful show curating Stiletto 2 owners.
Although the satellite feed was back up and running, the Stiletto 2 was still not able access any precious recordings. Instead owners were greeted with a screen saying they needed to subscribe the radio to use that function – what the what? Hang in there, a solution is coming…
After days of frustration and a couple of software updates documented by SL2 owners in the forums there is now a fix and the solution is a simple one. Simply dock the device, set the channel to 0, and sit back and relax while your Stiletto 2 updates the final update needed for fully functional glory.
Its been a long week for patient SL2 owners and although most are happy to put this all behind them, there are still a couple of isolated incidents of people experiencing issues such as not being able to access their “best of xm”channels. If you happen to be one of those people, the forums are lighting up with new Stiletto 2 members tracking the issues and ready to lend a helping hand.
[Special thanks to Pericles and all the new members of the forum for helping each other out.]
Would have been nice to get an email from Sirius regarding either the issue or the fix, or both. This has been an issue since the 11th?! I didn’t try to connect my SL2 via satellite until the 16th, when Stern came back from vacation. During the weeks he’s been off I listened to my recordings or via the wi-fi, since I was also on vacation and had no way to connect via satellite.
But what really angers me is the awful customer service. First of all, it must be outsourced to a company in another country where they don’t even try to hide their accents or use a common English name. Even when introducing themselves with their names I had to ask many times for them to repeat their names, and none of them even bothered to try and enunciate for clarification.
Second, it seems like they are sticking to close to a flow-chart, and can’t do anything if there’s any kind of deviation from it. Every time I called I was told to tune to Channel 184 and wait 5 minutes for the reactivation signal. They funny thing is, for the satellite tuner, there was a message with the option to either continue with activation or continue without, and with choosing the latter, I could listen to the satellite but not via wi-fi. Informing customer service of this made them even more confused.
You probably guessed by now that I called them several times with no success. I think it must have been eight or nine times, and twice they were smart enough to connect me with a “tech” person (one would assume with using the auto-attendant, I would have been routed directly to one). The first time, though, the tech didn’t know what was going on, so she said she was going to check and see if it was a system-wide issue (not an issue just with my unit) and thus put me on hold. Well, I gave up waiting after 15 minutes. This was on the 16th. At least the second time I got to speak with a “tech”, today on the 18th, they were aware of the issue but told me there wasn’t a solution yet (too bad they don’t read your site), and that I’d just have to wait until there was one, at which time I should be notified. I’m not going to hold my breath for them to contact me back. But you’d think if they know of the solution, they’d put some sort of bulletin up on their website.
Unfortunately, it seems that this is a case of ineptitude due to corporate bloat and the hand not knowing what the foot is doing. A lot of other SiriusXM subscribers I know, who are unhappy with the costs combined with the poor customer service, are planning to unsubscribe once Stern is gone. More and more it looks like I might just do the same.