Stop me if you’ve heard this one.^[a]

I hope you’ll excuse me for a moment while I take a moment to whine. I understand that none of the things that I faced on the day in question were serious; most of them are minor annoyances at worst, but, combined, they were enough to make the day a bit annoying.

• My girlfriend was at a conference, and she’d called and left me a message while I was in a meeting. Halfway through the message, her voice became considerably quieter and I could barely hear her. I figured it was a problem with the message itself, but, no, it turns out that my cell phone is dying. The main earpiece randomly switches to a volume so low that only Superman (or Sylar, after he stole Dale’s powers last year) could hear it.
• After a couple of months of worrying about bills, I was playing with a budget calculator on my bank’s website, and realized that I should make plenty of money to keep all these bills in check without a lot of pressure. That inspired me to finally start a real budget and work on getting completely out of debt. I’ve made half-hearted tries before, but this time I’m oddly excited about it. Step one of the Get Debt Free plan was to get organized, and to do that, I needed to get access to my bank’s online banking site again. Except, there’s absolutely no 24-hour assistance for said site, and all the branches of this bank close at 4. It’s a minor setback, but I’m a rather impatient person.
• Finally, when I was already annoyed (but not really having a “bad day”, my Xbox 360 froze while I was playing Half-life 2 from The Orange Box. This had happened a couple of times since I’d gotten the game, so I shut the console off, restarted, and saw the light ring around the power button light up. With flashing red lights. Three of them. The Xbox 360 “Red Ring of Death”. If the name didn’t clue you into what it means, let’s just say it isn’t a good sign.

I think it goes without saying that I found the death of my Xbox 360 a bit upsetting, but I’ll say it anyway. If this had still been my first Xbox 360 (purchased on the release date in November 2005), I would probably have been annoyed, but calm. If this had still been my second Xbox 360 (received from the Xbox Repair Center in early 2006 nearly a month and a half after I sent in the first one because it had been locking up every time I turned it on), I probably would’ve been only slightly angry. If this had been my third Xbox 360 (received in October 2006 from the Xbox Repair Center after my 2nd Xbox became a very expensive paperweight that had three flashing red lights on it), I would’ve been moderately angry. But this is my fourth Xbox 360, received in April of this year after the third died and was shipped off to the Repair Center Xbox 360 Graveyard. I was furious.

I made sure to mention this in the online support ticket I filled out. That Support Ticket also included a description of the problem:

While playing The Orange Box, my Xbox 360 started locking up. Today, when I turned it on, I got three flashing red lights in the light ring around the power button. None of the items on the support page helped.

Emphasis added so readers will understand my reaction to the e-mail that I received in response (from “Benjamin”):

I’m sorry to hear that you’re having problems with your console. Due to lack of information, we cannot provide you the exact troubleshooting information…

Do you wonder what information they needed? Here are the questions he asked:

1. If there are red lights flashing on the console?
2. How many red lights are flashing on the ring of light?
3. Does the console freezes when playing a game?

Apparently, Benjamin found a lack of information in my initial e-mail because there weren’t enough pictures for him to follow along.

Xbox 360 failures are pretty common. They are, in fact, so common that anyone whose Xbox 360 has been locking up or whose Xbox 360 has the “Red Ring of Death” can simply request a repair directly from here without needing to talk to a human being.

Fortunately, they supposedly tracked down the problems in the manufacturing process in July of 2007, so maybe this next one will work right.

I won’t hold my breath.

1. The timeline in that post seems a bit off from what I remember. If it’s right, then this is my fifth time through the system, not my fourth. [↩]