Customer Loses Xbox 360 Artwork During Repair 330
An anonymous reader writes "The Consumerist is reporting that one unlucky individual had to send his Xbox 360 in for repairs. The catch is he had spent a great deal of time getting signatures and artwork on the outside of the console from notable members of the gaming industry. He specifically asked and even sent a letter along with his console requesting that the outside of the case be returned intact. When he got it back it was once again, plain white. Assuming that this is a genuine claim, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the missing/cleaned case Microsoft should at least apologize to the guy."
He's an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the concept behind getting signatures in the first place, it may be cool to get XBox developers to sign an XBox, but what's the point of getting "notable members of the gaming industry" to sign a product that has a guaranteed maximum lifespan? Wouldn't taking a polaroid and having them sign that be a better way to preserve those memories?
Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Funny)
Besides, haven't polaroid stopped selling their instant cameras/film now?
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http://www.polaroid.com/products/product_list.jsp?&sc=Handheld [polaroid.com]
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Yeah they still sell them, but only until stock runs out.
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Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Informative)
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If you could go back in time and get the autograph of Leonardo da Vinci, would you have him scrawl it some paper or would you have him write it on a bale of hay? The value of an autograph is arguable, but the medium upon which it is recorded is important as well.
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Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Having an artist autograph their current chosen medium seems reasonable to me. Yes, the XBox 360 is going to be obsolete - but that won't mean that, retroactively, Red Vs Blue wasn't made on an XBox 360. That way you get both the autograph and a nice slice of history.
"Yessiree, this is an actual autograph by one of the creative minds behind Red Vs Blue! And even better, you're looking at a real XBox 360, just like the one Red Vs Blue was made on!"
Same argument goes for any game developer or designer, obviously.
Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also longer than oil based paint used on the great paintings by the masters, which often sell for millions. Longer than the canvas used for those paintings as well.
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Re:He's an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
Paper will last but it essentially turns to dust even when stored in perfect conditions. Quite a number of the dead sea scrolls could not be recovered because they were dust. An Xbox case will certainly last longer than 500 years given museum quality handling and storage.
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Re:He's an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
You've never been to The Hermitage [hermitagemuseum.org], have you?
Re:He's an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, on the issue of whether he should have sent it or not, you're probably right in that he should have kept that one and bought a new one. But maybe he couldn't afford a new one at the moment and made an unwise decision.
Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Informative)
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From TFA:
Maybe he wasn't clear enough? Maybe he should've pointed out why he wanted that case?
Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone expect otherwise from Microsoft?
Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:He's an idiot (Score:4, Interesting)
Normally they would have pulled the LCD out, and stuck a new one on (case and all) but, by me asking, an Apple employee somewhere had to unscrew the new LCD from the new case and do the same to the old LCD. They then put the entire thing back together. I got my artwork back, without any problems what so ever!
Re:He's an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
No, seriously, are we that fucking complacent that we just accept bullshit just because it's a corporation???
Re:He's an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems a silly question. Let me ask you this, would you rather have an original Nintendo signed by the people who made Super Mario Bros., or a long-since faded polaroid picture of a Nintendo with scrawl covering the picture?
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I actually have a signed copy of The C++ Programming Language [amazon.com] as well as a signed Polaroid of me and Bjarne at an old tradeshow. I also have a signed polaroid of me with merlyn.
The book is obsolete and deteriorating. The pictures look fine. The pictures are worth more to *me* than the signed book. Pictures can't be made obsolete because there is nothing in them that can be made obsolete.
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A GF sure made my playboys obsolete...
Re:He's an idiot (Score:4, Funny)
*ahem* as they say on various message boards around the web,
pics or it didn't happen.
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Given that I have polaroids nearly four decades old that are as good as new...
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what's the point of getting "notable members of the gaming industry" to sign a product that has a guaranteed maximum lifespan? Wouldn't taking a polaroid and having them sign that be a better way to preserve those memories?
Seems a silly question. Let me ask you this, would you rather have an original Nintendo signed by the people who made Super Mario Bros., or a long-since faded polaroid picture of a Nintendo with scrawl covering the picture?
Good point for sure. I would want the real NES with signatures.
However, I would also never ever mail that NES anywhere without the expectation that it will be lost forever. If it had any problems, I would buy a new one. The new one would be acceptable to mail in for repair, but not the signed collector one.
Yes, MS fucked up big time for lying to this poor guy.
However, while I wont go as far as to say he deserved it, he obviously did not care enough about his valued collector item to take care of it prop
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Can I take polaroids to gaming conventions? (Score:4, Informative)
But yes, he should have bought a new Xbox and switched the case. Expecting a mass-market repair center to spend extra time/money on you just because you painted your Xbox a different color is, ummm, "unrealistic".
You Don't Even Need a New 360 (Score:5, Insightful)
You're intending to keep this for a long time, so for a couple of years you just have an empty case. When the XBOX 720 or whatever comes out, 360s will be a lot cheaper and you can put your old 360 in there or buy a new one to fill out the case.
I haven't looked into it deeply, but I saw that custom clear cases were $50 or so. How much could a stock case really cost?
Just poor planning, really. If you wanted to get signatures of all major developers and felt it important to preserve that, then, y'know, put that thing in a protective box and never open it.
Re:You Don't Even Need a New 360 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:He's an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:He's an idiot (Score:5, Funny)
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Dude! Don't hold back, tell us how you really feel!
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They didn't tell him... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just can't decide if the old one was discarded or some repair guy decided that he really liked the case and kept it.
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I just can't decide if the old one was discarded or some repair guy decided that he really liked the case and kept it.
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Re:They didn't tell him... (Score:5, Informative)
dur (Score:4, Interesting)
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As another poster pointed out, the consoles are repaired by badly paid assembly line workers, who're supposed to blindly follow instructions. Assembly line workers usually lack education, so the instructions must be kept simple - instead of 'remove any paint/stickers obstructing airflow', it probably says 'remove any paint/stickers'.
In most cases, removing paint
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Can't believe Agents (Score:5, Insightful)
However, you can never rely on an agent for anything. They really can say anything, and generally are not held accountable. You have to go up to supervisor level and above, get employee identification information, and to some extent, get a written letter of intent from the company.
It's like asking the sales guy for technical information on how stuff works. Bad Idea. Go to tech support to talk to the guy instead.
That being said, it seems pretty clear from the article that somebody at Microsoft may have been mean and spiteful to "wash" the case. I say that only since we do not know what processes go on inside. It may be possible that multiple people are responsible for the repair, and the person taking the unit out the box and reading the letter just lacked the appropriate standing or ability to communicate anything down the line. The person that washed the case, may have been simply doing his job, and may have even had reservations about doing it. That employee may have had nobody to talk to either, or even the time and the "empowerment" to do so. It is entirely possible that the whole operation is so big, that expecting this kind of interdepartmental communication and cooperation is just unreasonable, and a little naive.
That is what I believe. That kind of operation must be so huge, given the volume, that for the systems and policies to be implemented to track this incident from its creation to its conclusion is just too costly of an undertaking. You would have to believe that they could create a RMA and from the very beginning include dynamic handling instructions that would be passed throughout the entire process. Most business fail at this already.
If anybody is truly responsible, it is the agent for making that representation in the first place. That agent, by their representations, implied that such abilities do exist.
Of course it would be interesting to know if there are policies in place to retain cases and artwork. On the surface, it is easy to condemn M$ overall for this, but there are just too many unknowns in the story.
Re:Can't believe Agents (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone asked a specific question of a customer service representative. That representative gave a clear and unambiguous answer. Either that answer was incorrect, or a serious mistake was made internally.
It doesn't matter which of those was the case. If you bring a car to an auto shop, and they rip out your engine, do you let them get away with "oh well someone made a mistake"? "Our customer service representative wasn't authorized to make that promise"? "Our company's just too big man, there's nothing you can do about it! These things just happen."
Fuck that.
Microsoft support screwed up. I don't know what section they screwed it up in, but I honestly don't care. The details don't matter. Microsoft support screwed up and should take responsibility - figuring out where the mistake was made is their problem.
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Also you as a customer cannot possibly be expected to the internal structure and politics of any corporation they are dealing with.
In some places it's actually the law that if a corporation agrees something
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In the end they fixed his xbox - thats what their job is.
Plus I'm sure in the eula/support agreement it states somewhere that their responsibility during repair is to restore the unit to its original factory condition - which means bye bye artwork.
And for the CSR that told this guy his artwork woul
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And yeah, I agree, they should have just said "we can't guarantee anything". That at least would have been honest. But they didn't.
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The customer's negotiated agreement supercedes any "eula/support agreement". If this were not the case then the entire economy of any country daft enough write its contract law any other way would collapse in a very short order.
And for the CSR that told this guy his artwork would be preserved probably thought he was
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Someone asked a specific question of a customer service representative. That representative gave a clear and unambiguous answer. Either that answer was incorrect, or a serious mistake was made internally.
It doesn't matter which of those was the case. If you bring a car to an auto shop, and they rip out your engine, do you let them get away with "oh well someone made a mistake"? "Our customer service representative wasn't authorized to make th
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At best, that's a loophole.
Re:Can't believe Agents (Score:5, Insightful)
If you ask me to sign a contract, and I say no, and you ask another 20 times and I finally sign it, am I exempt from it because you asked me a lot? Not in the least. Same deal here. If the company said they'd do X, and they didn't do X, I don't see any excuses.
(I don't actually know if they did say so. But I'm assuming that they did.)
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How is this different from asking someone several times "Will you sell X to me?", "Can I borrrow Z?", "Will you marry me?", "Will you have sex with me?", etc, etc. There is little stopping one person asking another person the same question (or variations along the lines of "have you changed your mind about...") several times. That the asker/askee/both may be "corporate people" dosn't change this. A business would have a hard t
I don't know that it was spiteful (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that'd be pretty normal procedure for returns. Quite often when I've had to return something, I've gotten a different unit returned to me. They recieve the part, verify that it is defective, that the warranty does cover it, and then ship out a replacement so I don't have to wait. The one I sent in then gets sent over to the repair shop to look at and they do with it whatever they wish to. I'm happy since I have my item back quickly. In fact some companies even allow for cross ship. eVGA will allow you to buy enhanced warranties so that they'll ship you out a card, then once you get it you ship the old one back. Cuts down on your downtime that way.
So, I'm guessing that is MS's normal procedure. Now in this case, they got it noted that the guy wanted his orignal box back and said "no problem, we can do that." However, the reason he did, or maybe even that he did, never got sent down the line. So it goes to repairs, gets fixed, and then there's some guy who's job it is to clean them up and make them look nice. He hasn't been told this picture is supposed to stay, for all he know somebody's kid was scribbling on it. His job is to clean up the boxes, which he does.
The shipping department then gets the box back from repairs, matches it up to go back to the original owner since they have instructions to that effect, and he gets his unfortunately cleaned 360.
I really doubt that anyone would have done this out of spite. All other MS conspiracy theories aside, they LOVE the Red vs Blue guys. They've had them do promotions for launches and so on. This isn't a case of a Tux penguin or something that might go against their corporate culture, this is something that is supportive of MS all the way.
I'd just bet on bad communication in trying to do something that isn't normal procedure.
MS doesn't repair your Xbox 360 for you... (Score:5, Informative)
FYI, if you mail-in your 360 for "repairs" your going to get a previously refurbished 360. MS does this in order to accelerate turnaround. Moreover, what you get back could very well be an older model that is more prone to failure.
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And he did, the odd part is not that he got back someone else's case, but that he got his own case back scrubbed clean.
Someone specifically knew he wanted the same case, and they scrubbed all the stuff away before giving it back. It sounds malicious.
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I wonder if it's malice or just standard procedure. Here's a possible scenario: the customer service rep was asked to make sure that he received the original Xbox 360 back and not a refurbished one. So the tech support guy said "sure" and marked that in the repair order. And, just as requested, he in fact got the original Xbox 360 back.
Now, since the default is to refurbish the Xbox 360s, it would make sense that part of the standard repair would be to clean the case. It's entirely possible that the custo
I doubt it was malice... (Score:2)
As for putting a special piece of paper in the box with instructions on it? Not very realistic either.
Re:MS doesn't repair your Xbox 360 for you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Never ascribe to malice what could as easily be caused by incompetence, stupidity, or forgetfulness.
This is true in dealing with large corporations, and it is extra true in marriage.
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This is called "negotiation". The only idiot here is t
Which isn't surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact with some premium support packages, it is explicit. For example at work we contract with MPC to provide our computers. Part of that is we get good support. Something breaks, I send them an e-mail saying "This part on this serial number is broken, I want a n
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In which case they are specifically requesting a replacement.
They then send me a replacement, via next day air. I install it and get it working, then send them back the old one (which they pay shipping for) when I've got time. Net effe
Pretty common... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pretty common... (Score:4, Insightful)
Many of the companies with service centers would like that to be true, but that doesn't mean that it is. As always, in the *only way* to know your legal standing in a case like this is to talk to a lawyer.
If that were true in this case then it would make it *utterly* obvious that someone at Microsoft was ethically at fault. If such an agreement were assumed then the letter included in the case indicated a lack of acceptance of that arrangement - in which case doing anything other than shipping it back untouched would be obviously unacceptable.
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This is definitely not true unless you are informed that you will not receive the original unit back and agree to this. There may be some companies that have people sign a form agreeing to such conditions when they send a unit in for repair, but many don't. In that case, they are obligated to return the original unit. In the absence of an agreement to the contrary, the company doesn't get to set a policy unilaterally. Such transactions are governed by law.
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Actually this is generally not the case. Becuase the "law of the land" considers that the specific machine in question is and continues to be the customer's personal property. Unless they have agreed otherwise. Even such an agreement is unlikely to protect the company if they enguage in theft or vandalism...
Is scrubbing the case standard procedure? (Score:2)
The article failed to mention what was wrong with the unit specifically and yes, it makes a difference.
I have to wonder if "cleaning the case" is part of standard operating procedure.
This doesn't seem right somehow.
I love some of the comments about markers (Score:2)
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Adding insult to injury (Score:2)
Jesus Christ (Score:2, Informative)
autograph cover (Score:2)
It consists of a few plastic panels that clip over the box making it appear as natural as possible. But you can snap them off to protect your artwork when traveling or sending the system off for repair.
Actually, I don't have a patent but I had this going since the Atari 64 so I claim prior art on anyone wanting to block people from making them. I originally made the so it would be easy to hide the artwork of
This is too easy! (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Issue a statement of apology explaining that you will get to the bottom of the problem.
2. Go ahead and look for the Xbox (but secretly you know this is futile and the box is next to the Ark or was really cleaned).
3. Contact the complaining customer and ask him what signatures were on the Xbox.
4. Contact the artists that signed the box. Make a big PR festival out of it! Have Bill Gates (or heck...anyone famous will do) take a brand new Xbox to each artist and have them sign it.
5. Send the Xbox back to the kid. No wait, have Bill Gates deliver it in person. Film the whole thing and put it on youtube, etc.
6. PR disaster averted and gold stars for everyone.
The media would eat this up and the free publicity would be worth its weight in cheetos.
Too boring and predictable (Score:5, Funny)
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Probably the issue tracking system and everything else down the line lacks the ability to account for personal requests: You send in a broken box, they send back a
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As a gesture of goodwill... (Score:5, Funny)
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there are slight smudges where there used to be signatures. It's not a new case, They just cleaned it. Thus, finding the "old" case is not the issue, this is completely irreversible and the only option is to give some sort of recompensation.
What I woulda done (Score:2, Interesting)
Should have bought a new one... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole idea of sending a customized anything to a central repair place screams out for a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. The box may be special to you, but it isn't to them. You can't expect major manufacturers to spend extra time/money on you just because you decided to paint your box a different color. The world doesn't work that way.
Buy a new Xbox, swap the innards. Xbox all fixed.
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I'm not surprised (Score:4, Informative)
in other news (Score:5, Funny)
How to Write a Business Letter (or email) (Score:4, Insightful)
This is unfortunate ... but perhaps an opportunity to discuss how to write for results.
Actions that you are requesting need to be immediately obvious.
The rest of the letter can be junk. The first few lines should have said "please do not clean or replace my XBOX cover", probably in bold.
You can't expect people to read a story. (In this case even a clear letter probably wouldn't have helped, but it certainly wouldn't have hurt).
I Just Got One Like it on E-bay! (Score:3, Funny)
damn
To those who suggest case-switching: (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, surely he heard of all the RRoD horror stories, so perhaps working toward a second box should have been in his plans?
If there's written evidence from Microsoft that promised him they wouldn't touch the signatures, there's no doubt that they are liable. It'll be quite a bit harder to prove without that.
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Acetone? You must be kidding.. (Score:2)
Anyone touching the outer casing with acetone is prone to make a mess of it. Anything BUT acetone is fine. If you're trying to remove sticky labels , lighter fuel is the thing to use (basically very clean petrol - anyone amy idea how they get it this clean) - also excellent to zap chewing gum stains.
Disclaimer: no expert on flammable liquids but damn well on plastic..
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The witty comment almost makes itself. :P
more xbox1s will be alive in 2015 than 360s (Score:2)
all 360s will probably die by then.
Maybe thats MS idea along, built in planned obsolescence through product self death like cloths. Genius!!