Ups, red ring of death!

Here's a non-support story relating to the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death, Microsoft and UPS all at once. You can read the original here with added pictures to illustrate the situation.

Like many of you, I have a shiny new copy of Halo 3 begging me to skip work and abandon family. The graphics are amazing, the game play liquid smooth, the sound design without peer, and the online gaming puts the Halo franchise firmly back on top, or at least that's what I've heard. For, sad to say, my personal Xbox 360 is gone, abandoning me in my time of need.

It all started on the 21st of August. I purchased an HD-DVD drive for my 360, complete with a free copy of 300, from my local and moderately incompetent Best Buy (they tried to charge me for the copy of 300 until I corrected them). After installing the software for the drive on the 360, I popped in 300 and sat back to enjoy all the highly-defined heroics. And it was glorious! For 10 minutes. Then the screen froze. Was Microsoft's HD software so poor it crashed just like Windows? Nope. For when I restarted my 360, I saw the inevitable:

Three red flashing lights (aka la red ring of death). The sign of a general hardware failure.

@%$@! So much for high def movies or gaming. But it was still over a month until Halo 3, plenty of time to get my system fixed. Microsoft had wisely extend my original warranty from 90 days to a full year, then tacked on another 2 years for this particular problem. Wisely I say because we Americans have this thing called a class-action lawsuit and 360s have been dying a rate far beyond the norm. From my personal circle of friends, 3 out of 6 360s have failed so far. The three oldest. The other three people are not optimistic.

So I called up Microsoft to get the system repaired. Mike (a supervisor) said they would mail me a prepaid box to return my console in (by ground), it would be repaired or replaced in 2-3 days once it arrived at the repair center in Texas and mailed back (by ground). I asked about a cross-shipping a replacement (many companies have this option if you are loud enough; some better companies like Dell even use it as a standard practice). Apparently it was not an option. I asked about upgrading the shipping at my cost, also a no go. So I requested that Mike email me the address to ship my system to (as to shave off one of the ground transit times).

I never did receive that email. Instead I got the prepaid box off the UPS truck several days later. Fine. I packed up my console and dropped it off at my local Staples. It got to the repair center on the 31st of August.

On the 5th of September, 3 full business days after they had received my console, I called and spoke with a supervisor by the name of Tom. Tom told me that my console had not been taken care of yet, that Mike had erred in promising a 2-3 day turn around. A Microsoft employee providing false information? I was shocked. It was not to be the last time. At any rate, Tom promised (with a confirmation) that it would ship within 7 days of its arrival at the repair depot. Lovely. Still plenty of time before Halo 3 though.

On the 8th of September, 8 days since they had gotten my 360, I called again and spoke with a supervisor named Tyler. Tyler was smart / honest enough not to make any promises. He merely stated that Tom and Mike should not have done so and that the total processing time for the whole repair/replacement cycle was currently 3-4 weeks. I inquired if Microsoft was planning on making good on either of the earlier promises I was made. It was not. I requested to be sent up another level or transferred to someone in the complaints department. I was denied, though he did suggest I write a letter to the legal department. I declined.

For your personal reference, filing a Better Business Bureau (BBB) complaint online is both easy and therapeutic. I recommend it to anyone frustrated with customer service (or lack thereof). My complaint was based on the failure of Microsoft to honor either of the promises I had been made. Slow is one thing, lying is entirely different.

So I called them again in a couple days, the 12th I think, to see if anything had happened. To my great surprise, nothing had happened. I was given some excuse that they had so many consoles to replace that they were waiting on new units from China. My amusement factor was very low. I casually mentioned that I had filed a BBB complaint on my customer service experience so far (complete with names). This seemed to spark some interest.

Enough interest that Microsoft actually called me two days later, on the 14th. I'm still not sure which unit inside Microsoft it was (the upper echelon of Xbox support, legal?), but they had good news, my 360 had been send out (by ground) that very day! Of course they didn't admit any fault on Microsoft's part, but she was very apologetic about the amount of time it had taken and assured me that I should not have been promised anything in the first place. Whatever. It was in the UPS system with a scheduled delivery on the 19th. Well before the launch of Halo 3 (the biggest media launch to date) on the 25th.

This is the point at which events went from annoying to absurd.

UPS lost my Xbox. That's right. It was moving in a timely fashion from Texas all the way up to the New England sorting center in Massachusetts. The anticipation was growing. I ordered a couple HD-DVDs to celebrate. Then I noticed something odd. 8 hours after the arrival scan of my console in Massachusetts, it was out for delivery. Not in Bangor, Maine where I happen to live, but in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. There was no departure scan from Massachusetts or an arrival scan in Hawaii, but there it was, out for delivery in some tropical paradise while I was rotting, 360-less, in near-arctic Maine.

This inspired me to call UPS. Their support person admitted that it looked like something had clearly gone wrong, but they couldn't do anything until the package had missed its delivery date. I called back after midnight. In the mean time I had called Microsoft and let them know of the situation (my most frustrating call of the whole lot, 90 minutes and I was never sure they got my request). I finally conned the UPS person into letting me speak with a supervisor and getting a tracer (UPS lingo for an oops-we-screwed-up) put on my package. She also called Hawaii to confirm if they had the package. They did not.

This brings us to the 26th of September. Halo 3 has launched, I even own a copy. My Xbox is still somewhere in UPS limbo (no tracking updates since the 18th). I called Microsoft again to explain the situation. The first person I spoke with had never heard of UPS losing a system (yeah, I'm special), so he bumped me up (after about 40 minutes) to Janet, a supervisor. Janet could do nothing for me (this seemed to be a trend for all the low level customer support people). She did setup a "call back", which, to my understanding, means that after waiting two more days, someone with the authority to actually send me out another unit will call me. Yippie.

So, after something over 6 hours of my life spend talking to badly qualified customer support personal, what have I gained? I still don't have my Xbox back. No one has admitted any fault. I cannot even speak to a human with any authority to get my case moving. I'll update this as new news comes in. Someday I may even have a 360 to call my own.

Least my PSP is still functional. Jeanne D'Arc might not be Halo, but it does dull the frustration.