Thank you all for the replies. I will call Dish today and cancel the order.
Here's the thing that seemed so weird to me ... the guy DID ask for my "full" credit card number at the end of the (very long) call, because the work order "required it" so that Dish could place a temporary charge ($1) against the card in the event that I failed to return the Hopper equipment if I cancelled the account down the road. I wasn't THAT naive, though. I pointed out that Dish already had my card on account. He said that this was separate, and I said that I was sorry, but that he'd called me, and I had no idea who he really was or if he was even really calling from Dish at all. In order to give him my credit card number, I'd have to be able to call him back through a number on the official Dish site ... and while I was explaining this, I was doing a quick Google search trying to connect "Dish" with the 888 number he'd provided for himself earlier, and turning nothing up.
He said that he would take the personal risk of putting through the work order without the full credit card number if I promised to update this information following the installation, and I figured what the heck, by then I'll know if this is legitimate, so whatever.
An hour later, the appointment is showing up in "My Appointments" in "My Dish" account online ... so I'm thinking, well, I guess this guy must have been legit ... except that then I can't find anything on the Web about a new satellite launch causing Dish to need to replace a ton of existing customer equipment, and that FEELS to me like the sort of campaign that would create some buzz.
I've never bought equipment through a retailer, always directly through Dish, so I have no idea how this guy got our info if not a Dish guy ... account must have been compromised if so ... but wouldn't he have access to the R00 numbers, too, if so? (I'm not looking at the account online right at the moment, but I thought I remembered all that info being available under My Equipment somewhere) ...
Very weird, all around.
Anyway, will call Dish and try to get a more definitive idea from someone there what the deal is. Presumably, if this order came from a retailer, they'll be able to figure out who it came from and be able to get to the bottom of it.
And no offense was intended to Hopper fans by my expressed hesitation ... I have no experience with the system whatsoever (have never even seen it), so don't have any reason to bash it. I just have some concerns about whether it will work well for us. We had DirecTV as a "backup" system for some years here in the mountains, and loved it (back in the 2002/2003 timeframe, I think) ... but sometime in the last 5 years, we found the on-screen menu displays became much harder for us to read. I can't remember exactly all of what changed, but I think the text became smaller (probably to accommodate other on-screen promos or design elements), switched to light letters on a dark background, etc. .. probably all things that looked great to the designers and younger eyes, but was annoying to us. I was 40 at the time and my husband was 45 (so he was already dealing with presbyopia ... me, not yet) ... and this was watching a 32" HDTV from a distance of 6 feet. We also found the system had become sluggish to respond to commands, and didn't like various other software changes ... so, sadly, dropped it and stuck with Dish. Anyway, that was 5 or 6 years ago ... our eyes are even OLDER now. ;-) It was with this in mind that reading people's complaints about "gray on gray" readability issues with Hopper menus gave me a slightly queasy feeling ... especially since the complaints had been going on for something like a year and a half, which made me think that a corporate-level decision had been made that the issue must be limited to people with bad eyes or bad TVs and that there was no real need to try to improve readability.
Also still a bit concerned about Internet dependency issues, but that's something I'll have to research when I have time ... for now, will zero in on calling Dish and finding out what they can tell me about last night's adventure.
Thanks all ...
Sorry about the confusion -- he posted while I was writing my last reply, so I hadn't seen his reply yet when I posted mine. Will be interested to hear back what he finds out ...
