You will recall that last week my wife and I called Microsoft to get a shipping box for my dead Xbox. That converstation lasted 45 minutes and included no less than six corrections to the shipping address as read back by the woman on the other side of the phone who apparently did not really speak english at all.
Well, the box arrived that the beginning of this week. The only problem: it arrived at the wrong address.
We found this out when the poor person who received the box called left a message for us at home in the middle of the work day. Sad to say, we didn’t get back to them her in time, and she mailed the box back to Microsoft before we could get in touch with her again.
But my intrepid wife called them back, being the only one I know who is both brave and stupid enough to navigate those waters again. Incredibly, she got someone who speaks English and had them read back the shipping address that was in their system.
Let’s say the correct address was something like this:
Peter Blogger
Google Hall, room 475
3500 Forest Street
Pittsburgh PA
Here is what would have been in their system:
Peter Boggler
Newline Google Hall
350 Fords Street -475
Pittsburgh PA
Brilliant. She spent 10 more minutes giving him the correct address, and with any luck my service box will be here next week.
Assuming they fix it, I’m not really sure what I’ll do with the Xbox when I get it back. Part of me wants to fire up TF2 and Portal to see what the fuss is about (no, I don’t have a PC, and no, I’m not using Steam). But, part of me is ready to just cancel Live and put the box on Ebay. I can probably live without TF2 or Mass Effect, and it seems to me that if Microsoft doesn’t give two shits about me, I really shouldn’t care about them either. I mean, first they don’t care enough about their hardware to actually make it work. Then when they acknowledge that it’s broken, Microsoft doesn’t even care enough about the quality of the customer service experience to hire English speaking phone support people to service their English-speaking territories. My pent up dork anger makes me want to tell Microsoft to go to hell. But, my overly realistic pragmatist side says that they’ve already gotten their attach rate out of me, so what’s the difference.
I guess all of this rumination of premature anyway, since I still don’t actually have the service box yet. More later on this channel.
Look on the bright side. If you sell the Xbox and the games on eBay, you get some money back and Microsoft loses the license revenue from the games the buyer would otherwise acquire new. Though MS might thank you for sparing them the loss they would incur on selling a new Xbox…
I would recommend against selling it, even if it just collects dust for the near future. The geek in you will want to own it again eventually. If this weren’t true, I submit that you would not have bought the PS3 “as soon” as you did.
TF2 is a great game. I even rent TF2 dedicated server from Nationwide Bandwidth 24 Players max,dual CPU, with pretty much no lag, and very low ping most of the time. Just it give it a try before selling your xbox, you might like it enough to keep it.