My Second Call to Microsoft

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Four days after speaking to Richard, I hadn’t gotten my packing box yet. In the meantime, I tried turning my Xbox 360 on several times, just to see what would happen. I got the Ring of Death twice more. Other times, it would turn on and sputter gamely before freezing up.

Once or twice I even got an error 71, so I looked up this mysterious error 71. It has to do something with updates, but it could also be a general hardware failure. Duh! So I called Microsoft once again to see if they could tell me where my packing box was. Sure enough, Max answered again, just chipper as ever. He reported happily that my console was on its way back to my house, ready to go.

I couldn’t believe my ears! My console. Refurbished. Clean and bright and ready to go.

I hung up and decided to call again. Max answered and repeated the joyous news.

The only slight and insignificant wrinkle in this situation was I hadn’t exactly sent my Xbox in yet. While I am sure Microsoft has a lot of cool projects they are working on, time travel surely isn’t one of them. So, I decided Max was confused and perhaps addled. Could he be suffering from an error 71 himself?

Speaking to a live person this time proved to be a bit more difficult. Max wanted to talk about how my current ticket was in the midst of being solved, and didn’t offer the possibility of speaking with anyone else. I had to trick him out by starting a new ticket. Take that robot brain!

This time I was on hold about five minutes. I forget who I talked to this time, but I know it wasn’t the kind and gentle Richard. The person I spoke with assured me that a console would definitely not be in the box. He told me the box was actually in Redmond somewhere. Does Microsoft have any property in Redmond? I’ll have to look that one up (don’t email me about that one… it was sarcasm).

In any case, my empty box would be coming soon.

I hung up after asking the current person if my warranty would be extended in any way to cover the time that I didn’t actually possess my Xbox 360. He just laughed and laughed.

Sure, it might have been a silly question, but it made sense to me. I’ll be without my console for at least a month…maybe more. One twelfth of my year long warranty is going to be lost to me, and the refurbished unit I get back will not carry an extended warranty. Yikes?

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