A Tale of Customer Service Gone Right

A week ago my Xbox 360 suffered the dreaded Red Ring of Death, which effectively bricks the console.  This normally has a convenient solution. You box up your console and use prepaid shipping labels to get your 360 to a service center.  In 2-3 weeks you’re back to wasting your life on Fifa or whatever.

But I live in London now with an American Xbox.  The website made it seem as if I’d need to get my Xbox to the states because there wasn’t a solution here.  I started weighing my options of how to get it back to America. Could I give it to someone here going stateside? Could a future house guest buy one to bring over and take the bricked one back. Could someone in the states buy it and get it repaired to defray the costs? Things were getting convoluted.

Katherine, who is annoyingly always right suggested calling tech support, totally 20th century Neanderthal thinking to me, but what the F right? Turns out they would do the same thing here. They email shipping labels and have a courier pick it up! They would even switch it to PAL for me if I wanted. They’d also try to keep it region 1 because of all my region 1 games.

I’ll let you all know how it turns out cause I know maybe only Shawn and Tom give a shit. But whatever. Anyway, I know they set aside billions for this known issue, but who would have guessed that Microsoft would have this level of support?