Bah.

[digitaldiscipline]

MSFT support is (un)surpisingly incompetent. When my Xbox shit itself last week, I was shunted into what sounded like an Austrian call center for the autistically polite (I Vill Now Repeat Exactly What You Said and Say Thank You For That Information After Everything You say), which was, while helpful to the extent that it translated the "07" on the "Your Xbox Iz Fukt" screen into English ("Ur Hard Drive Iz Fukt"), was useless beyond that, since their computerized ticket system was down, so I couldn't get a case number, or even get the address of their Dead Tech Processing Gulag in Texas, were I inclined to part with $80 + shipping to have it resurrected.

Last night, a lightly-used 360 in my hot little hands (courtesy of the pit of financial desperation that is Craigslist; $400 system plus two games I'd have wanted to buy anyways, all for the price of the low-end system)... let's fire this sucker up. Online profile... okay, my gamertag is really obscure ("Rafe"), I know my directional keypad code... what do you mean, "invalid email address"? This is the one I get my billing notifications at, you jackasses. You want me to use a hotmail/msn/xbox.com passport account? WTF? Oh, I could get my billing information.... off the dead xbox. How helpful.

So, I call their customer service line (1-800-4my xbox, how cute)... go into account/billing by jumping through the appropriate hoops... and get a busy signal. Repeat twice more. 9:00am-1:00am are their purported hours of operation. What. The. Fuck.

Then I had a dream that the Secret Service showed up to drag me away as an unlawful combatant, and I had to try to use LJ to get out a quick message to let the world know that I was being abducted by the fucking government.

Which, on top of having a shitty softball game last night (game called on the mercy rule in the 4th inning, I'd been in the field long enough to not catch a blooper well in front of me, and never made it to the plate), has me in a happy place. At least the scale is saying friendlier things, and I have a consultation with a new chiropractor this afternoon (it would be nice to be able to turn my head to either side without someone injecting napalm into everything between my shoulder blades and my skull again).

Comments

Dude....

[maelstromsl.livejournal.com]

Axis is like the evil king of xBox resurrection - you should give him a call, I have seen him work unholy miracles.... that won't mess up your "live" acct.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

You could have stopped after the first four letters. We'd still get the picture.

Re: Dude....

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Well, now that I don't have to worry about blowing it up (since it already -is- blown up; the hard drive makes the Click Of Death until the power button is pressed again)... I think I'll just sell the corpse for parts.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Amazing the difference talking to someone in another department can make (see followup post).

Every time I've spoken with someone at MSFT in a non-outsourced call center, they've been just fine (there was a time when I was resurrecting the workstation in NOLA far too often, and having to re-activate MS Office by phone every time)