Wherein I join the ranks of the RRODed…

I suppose I was foolish to ever think that I had dodged a bullet with my XBox 360.  As countless other publications declared 100% failure rates with their XBox 360s, I thought that, perhaps, since I was not a “professional” game journalist that my well-ventilated 360 born circa April 2006 would just survive to tell its story to the next generation of consoles. How naive.

When Microsoft originally announced the 3-year warranty extension I was happy that they had finally admitted that there was an issue.  At the same time, though, I figured that I was probably just sitting on a ticking time bomb and wished that they would’ve instead offered an optional recall (as I indicated here and here), since it was clear even back then that this was a design flaw.  As I got closer to my 3-year mark in April I started to worry that it wasn’t going to happen to me in time.  After passing the date with nary an issue (that looked like RROD) I thought that maybe I was in the 30% or so that supposedly had a “good” 360.  Just over 5 months after my RROD warranty extension expired, in the middle of our Beatles: Rock Band release party, my XBox had had enough.

A call into Microsoft today resulted in absolutely no sympathy.  Instead, the foreign customer service agent  tried to convince me of the great deal I was getting by paying $99 to have my XBox repaired.  I resigned myself to the fact that this was the best I was going to do, until I remembered that my credit cards actually extend warranties as well.  I lost my receipt long ago and I got it from a Circuit City, so recovering it was not an option.  Nevertheless, I called American Express and the customer service agent was extremely helpful.  Amazingly, she told me that their extended warranty program would cover me since Microsoft extended it to 3 years for my specific issue (their extended warranty extends it a year after that).  I mentioned that I did not have a receipt and had no way of recovering it and she said that should be fine, that I should just send all the information I have (including the credit card statement).  I was kind of dumbfounded that they would be this nice to me, but I’m not going to complain.  I don’t know if it will work or not yet, but it certainly sounded promising.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been a loyal, debt-free customer with American Express since 2001 that they were happy to help me with this.  I only wish Microsoft treated their loyal customers the same way.