My Xbox 360 Came Home Today… Yay?

So there was no sign of the UPS man yesterday, but today, I set out my wife’s robe by the bed before I went to school and told her if anyone rang the doorbell, she had to go get it. She sleepily agreed (UPS requires you to sign for your returned Xbox 360). When I finally get out of class I call her and we work out a plan for the rest of the afternoon.

“The Xbox came today!” she exclaimed.

I was overjoyed. I finally was going to be able to hook it up to my computer with the help of an Xbox customer service rep, was going to be able to play my games again, I even borrowed Soul Calibur IV from a buddy by getting on my knees and begging him to part with it for a short time. Everything was set.

After running around hanging with my pal and doing errands, I open the box and start hooking up the system.

“We better keep the box honey, for the next time this thing breaks down,” I said, only half joking—knowing red rings of death were more likely than not to return someday.

Once I had it all hooked up, I turned it on and was greeted with the familiar boot up noise… but not the boot up display. In fact, my TV had no video of the 360 at all. Apparently it was working, as I synced up a controller and moved the cursor around audibly, but I couldn’t see anything.

At first I thought it could be my A/V connection, something I’ve had trouble with in the past. To test it, I hooked up my Wii, but there were no problems there, everything showed up fine. Frustrated, I called up the Xbox support line. After going through an annoying voice activated menu, I got to a real person.

I explained the situation.

“Could it be the cables? Can you use another set of cables?”

“I only have one set of cables, man.”

“Could you get a friend to come over and try their cables to make sure it’s not the cables before we set up another repair?”

I thought for a minute. My buddy Aaron brought his 360 over here the other night to use my internet connection (he doesn’t have one right now) and download a bunch of songs for Rock Band 2, as well as collect on the Microsoft points I owed him for getting us Castle Crashers.

“Well, someone brought their Xbox over here the other night and used my cables and it worked fine.”

“OK, let’s set up another repair order.”

ANOTHER REPAIR ORDER?!?

I grudgingly agreed, then was put on hold for a good five minutes or so. Then the guy came back and told me to hold some more. Then he came back again.

“I really must apologize, we’re doing a system upgrade right now and we can’t do any repair orders right now. Could you call us back in two or three hours?”

Absolutely. I plan to be good and intoxicated when I call so I can be as obnoxious as possible. I know it’s not these customer service schmoes’ fault, but I am furious. This is inexcusable. They sent me back my old system with repairs, but apparently didn’t bother to check if it worked before mailing it out. I don’t know what to do other than just continue going through the process, but this is really poor on Microsoft’s part. Not only did they rush the 360 out the door to be first to market, their repair service is apparently made up of monkeys. Good thing they sent me a month free of Xbox LIVE—that should just about cover the entire time I won’t have a system. Fuckers.

“Hey honey,” I cried out after getting off the phone. “Good thing we didn’t throw out that box yet!”

Max