There it was. Just when I thought I had escaped the seemingly inevitable, I discovered that God hated me, and I too was smitten with the ‘Red Ring of Death‘.

It was a Sunday afternoon, similar to many other passed, but one thing would set this apart from the other days. I was performing a skate demonstration for a close friend of mine, showing how the controls worked, and explained how the goal was to get lines rather than combos. What began as a fun and innocent activity quickly turned to something pure evil. My console locked. Strange. I shut the system off, and turned it back on. The friendly green light on the front of the console told me all was well. I proceeded to boot up the skate demo once more where my system locked again. Great. Impending hardware failure. I felt it in my bones much like those suffering from arthritis feel the change of humidity in the air when a storm approaches. Once more I powered off the console, and powered it on, except this time, the once happy greeting of the green light turned to the unhappy hello of the ‘Red Ring of Death‘.

I almost laughed to myself. What a joke. Was this a joke? Where is the hidden camera? There was none. I needed this thing fixed. What awful timing. Halo 3 is a week away, and even though I am not all that excited, I really do want to be apart of the largest video game release this year. To make matters a little worse, I was also in the Call of Duty 4 beta which I would now miss out on. Wonderful. Thanks Microsoft. You made my day. I figured I would get this repair in motion as quickly as possible to be sure that I had a new Xbox 360 back within a week or so. Afterall, that wasn’t too crazy to think. If this were Apple, I would have my replacement the next day before I even sent mine back. Microsoft would surely do something around that right? Wrong. I called up support, navigated through a few menus, and after only a few rings, found myself speaking to a Microsoft CSR. I explained the issue, and after a few troubleshooting steps such as ensuring there was proper ventilation (there was), and powering with the hard drive unplugged, we then determined what I knew to be all along; the Xbox was dead. It was dead and it needed some good old Microsoft refurbishing. Fine. At least it wasn’t going to cost me anything. The technician was fast, efficient, and just plain good all around. Kudos to the big MS for that detail. The next detail was not a good thing as Martha might say. The return box would arrive at my home within 4 -5 business days. Holy crap. 4 -5 days? Unless they overnighted this puppy back to their secret labs, fixed it in a few hours, then overnighted it back to me, this would not be back for Halo 3 day. I was devastated, but just like in a Ron Popeil ad, there was more. The entire process would take 4 – 6 weeks. What the hell? Perhaps this is where customer service is truly made or broken. Here we have a product with a known problem resulting in a very high failure rate. As a result, Microsoft extended the warranty to three years for all hardware related problems. Although a great gesture, this just is not enough. You cannot leave your customers in the dark. During this time I will have 4 – 6 weeks of Xbox Live service I cannot use, and 4 – 6 weeks of Xbox 360 play time that I have paid for, which I cannot indulge in.

This is not customer service, this is lip service.

A three year warranty sounds great, until you take into consideration the turn around time, at which point it becomes clear that this is far better on paper than in action. Microsoft, let me take a moment to say just this: If you were anywhere near as serious about customer service as Apple, the world would be a better place. Until you are, there is a special place in hell for you.