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The Man Who Went Through 11 Xbox 360s
1up is carrying the sad story of Justin Lowe. Just your average gamer, wanting to partake of the current generation of consoles. He's got a PSP, DS, PS3, and a 360. He really likes his 360 ... which is probably a good thing, since he's sent 11 of them back to Microsoft. He's now on his twelfth. The piece covers Justin's ongoing plight, and discusses Microsoft's claims of hardware failures being a 'vocal minority'. "Justin has not had a working system for longer than a month or two. The list of problems is almost comically large: three red lights of death, two with disc read errors, two dead on arrival, several with random audio and video-related issues and one that actually exploded. Looking at the situation through Moore's own standards, how has Microsoft performed? 'On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate them an 8... at first,' says Lowe. His [first] 360 broke in early January, just a few weeks after purchase."
Yes, I do, because the warranty says they have to.
Also, Microsoft is not primarily a retailer, especially in this case (AFAIK you can't even buy one directly from Microsoft.) They're a manufacturer.
And then they'd see me in court for violation of the warranty agreement.
What you and seemingly everyone else doesn't understand is that the odds of getting a bad unit 11 times in a row are not the odds of getting a bad unit once raised to the eleventh power, or times eleven, or any of that. They are totally unknown to us because we do not know the process. Perhaps due to some quirk of the ordering system, this guy was getting systems from a pool that had gotten poor QA, whereas most other users got them from some other group.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
MS Xbox service is bar none the worst I have ever encountered. The worst. On par with Gitmo and prison sodomy in terms of customer service.
I'm working from memory here but I have notebook of notes:
My box went red ring of light death on June 4th. I called XBox and discovered you have to get through the auto attendant Max, no matter what. So after about 5 minutes of Max I got stuck in a queue to talk to Eric or Gilbert or whatever they called Rajiv that day.
That person walked me through the process of the getting th SN etc and I gave them $140 via a credit card for them to process the 'repair'.
REPAIRS ARE SWAPS WITH ANOTHER REFURB UNIT.
So they send you a box to drop your old unit and remail it. The box took 4 days to get to me. It arrives fully assembled with no outer packaging:
It was damaged
It was damp
It was left on my porch
Apparently Xbox can't figure out how to ship a collapsed box that the postal service can stick in your mailbox. Anyway in goes the unit and I drive it down to UPS to ship it off.
It was sent the 8th. Xbox does not see it and log it back in until the 14th. Now begins a daily series of calls to get any status at all on this unit. Remember you have to get through Max the Justin Long of voice attendants first EVEN IF YOU HAVE A FUCKING INCIDENT NUMBER. The Best you can do is state loudly "AGENT" and "Max" breaks procedure and routes the call to another queue
Where you wait. And wait and wait about 15-20 minutes on average. When you get a person, 5 times out of 6 you get someone in India who
DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH OR IF THEY DO THEIR ACCENT IS SO THICK ITS UNINTELLIGIBLE BUT THE REALLY FUN PART IS THAT THESE RETARDS CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE SAYING EITHER.
My last name is six letters, six. SIX. I had to spell it out letter by letter EIGHT fucking times before I just started screaming and hung up the phone because Meena or whomever could not speak the language.
And so it goes a daily experience of trying to get some information. Around June 22-23 (7 days of calling) I found a agent who claimed to contact the service center and who stated it would arrive in 3-5 business days. He gave me a UPS tracking number which I discovered inside of 10 minutes was invalid. He also told me a 'supervisor' would call to verify.
They never did.
Let me just interrupt here that at the same time I fired off a bunch of support emails to Xbox trying to get any information at all. Their official email response was 'WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT AND CAN'T HELP YOU PLEASE CALL'
(3 of the calls during this time they simply hung up on me)
Anyway on the 24th I got an email back from support telling me the unit shipped and gave me another UPS tracking number which was also invalid. So I started calling again on the 24th, (we don't know anything), the 25th (it was picked up on the 24th and will be there 3-5 days and the 26th.
On the 26th - I was in the hold queue for a half hour. The person I spoke to immediately put me on hold the moment I gave them the incident number. After 15 minutes on hold they gave me the same invalid UPS tracking number. I would not let them go and they stuck me on hold again for another 15-20 minutes until some 'supervisor' got on the phone. Upon which time he told me that the UPS tracking number was right and that at this point, they didn't know where the unit actually was, just that it had 'probably' been shipped and that I should call UPS to figure it out and 'maybe they can help you'.
This was Tuesday the 26th, this week. So I called UPS, got their autoattendant and low and behold the tracking number had finally hit their system. That day. In fact it hadn't been shipped on Sunday it was shipped Tuesday afternoon about 2:30 local time or 3 hrs before I called them to check.
So here it is the 28th. 6 minutes ago it hit Greensboro NC but hasn't left yet. I don't if it will get to me in Raleigh today, but almost certainly tomorrow. June 30th.
That will
i'll tell you what they have in common...
electricity at this dude's house.
get a fuckin surge protector dumb ass
-mr silver