Bricked! "Hi, This Is Max."

I suppose it was only a matter of time before my 360 bricked. In my case, it was 8 months after DOP before I got the RRoD. Fortunately, the next dashboard update will allow for DRM transfer.

You know those guys who work at an amusement park giving safety information about the roller-coasters? The ones who say the same thing so many times a day for so many months that the multi-paragraph safety instructions end up coming out as one long, unintelligible string of mush? That's what the Xbox support woman who was handling my repair request today sounded like. I kept having to ask her to repeat herself because every sentence came out of her mouth as a single multi-syllabic sound. Everything seems to be in order for my repair now, though. I do have just one concern.

When pulling up my account, the woman mentioned that my console's warranty will run out in October 2008. My console's Date of Manufacture is June 2006 and my Date of Purchase was September 2007, so I don't know where she got that end of warranty date from. I'm assuming she just got the year wrong. If there's a problem after October I can send in my original receipt as long as it's within the 3-year warranty, but I'm concerned that they will accidentally lose the fact that that console's serial number doesn't match the receipt because it had to be replaced. I chose not to pursue the question with the woman today because it seemed to tax her enough to run through a prepared speech. I probably would have ended up getting transferred and disconnected multiple times before getting an answer.

Lack of enunciation aside, the process of getting my 360 repaired or replaced has gone well so far. I was probably only on the phone for about ten minutes total, and I didn't have to hold. I just had to talk to that stupid, automated "cool guy" for a while to confirm things like that I did, in fact, have the console plugged in when I got the RRoD.

One thing for Microsoft to note: I know that you train your people to say, "Thank you for that information," because you think it conveys politeness, but it's really just extremely annoying. It is especially so when you have to give them a dozen or so pieces of information and that's always the response.

It ends up sounding more robotic and repetitive than the "Max" personality of the automated system. Max just sounds like some a-hole thirty-something who's trying too hard to fit in with a teenage crowd. Why do I need to hear, "Hi, this is Max," from an automated system, anyway? What am I going to do, report that Max gave me bad customer service so that he gets fired and replaced with a new robo-receptionist?

Actually, that's not a bad idea.

Posted by Graven on Mon May 26, 2008 @ 9:06 pm EDT | 2 Comments