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I swear Microsoft's XBOX service center, and especially their Xbox customer service area, is staffed with a bunch of clueless imbeciles. (With apologies to those few individuals working for those areas that might know what they are doing, your clueless brethren are giving you one heck of a bad name).
I could relate the story of an acquaintance that sent his Xbox 360 back to Microsoft for repairs and had it lost by Microsoft. His adventures led to the coining of a term over at another site that I frequent that turned his handle into a verb that basically means you've been screwed by Microsoft. It took well over 3 months for his system to finally be returned to him, apparently severely lost in the shipping and handling systems at Microsoft.
Flash forward a few months to now, where I somewhat recently had to send my also somewhat recently purchased HD-DVD add-on drive back to Microsoft for repairs. First I had to sit through the not well scripted customer service center's handling of my problem. You know the deal, call into a service center, probably staffed in India (sorry, I'm not trying to be racist here, more trying to point out that you can easily tell you aren't talking to someone that speaks U.S. English as their native language), get someone reading a script asking the same stupid questions about your name, your address, e-mail address, what is wrong, apologizing for the problems you are having with --insert name of console here, rather than name of accessory-- *repeatedly* and hanging on way too long to tell you same things and apologize in the same stupid way until you want to throw-up into the phone and hope it gets through the phone system and back on the call taker.
After getting through the call center, and hoping that they took the details on the problem down correctly they finally instructed me to send back the defective HD-DVD drive. The problem with it? An eject button that didn't work. During manufacturing things weren't (as best I can tell) lined up correctly so you'd wind up mashing that button repeatedly to get the drive tray to eventually open for you. It had about a 2% success rate, if that, for all of the button mashing you might do. Anyway, they did tell me to send it back, and reminded me to send it via traceable shipping. No problem, USPS Priority Mail with Delivery Confirmation works for that.
Next day (3/18/07) the drive was on the way to McAllen TX. Door 18 for the service center. It was received there on 3/22/07 (estimated, according to the tracking information I have). But of course Microsoft's clueless service people have no information about that. None at all.
The best I get from them on my first call back was that I needed the tracking information. Ooops, didn't have the info handy (had left it at home and was calling during some down-time at work). Had to call back later that night. Got the info, called back in more irritated at not having any status on the earlier call, and promptly informed the call center geek that *I* had an update for him based on the tracking information. Provided tracking information, delivery dates, etc., and call center geek claimed to have put in a query for the repair center to get a status report. At that point I'm instructed to wait 72 hours for an answer to be returned "interoffice" or "internal system" style so that the call center will have an update for me.
That 72 hours was up yesterday, but still no update. Call back again on Monday please. Uh, yeah, sure. Call back and repeat same mindless process, providing same stupid answers that are are all accessible based upon the service number that I keep referencing when I call in. Then hold for several minutes while geeks in call center look at their computer screens, see no updates, and then tell me to call back another 3 days later.
Completely unacceptable, reprehensible, and clueless.
