360 Customer Support Adventures with “the Gaming Queen”

 

EDIT:  I came into work and checked my mail, and sure enough, UPS sent me and email with the incorrect address on it.  So I called back and this time on the third try finally got a helpful individual who wasn’t just trying to get me off the phone.  She canceled the first order and recreated it without making me go through the usual song and dance (”have you made sure the 360 is plugged in?”)  Should be getting my box in 3-5 business days.

Well,

I called Xbox Live support and got someone who barely spoke english. The good news is that my particular problem seems to be covered under warranty still. He started a ticket, but as we got to the end, I happened to ask, “what address is it being shipped to?”, since he hadn’t confirmed an address in the beginning. He gave me my old business address.

When I told him that we’d moved buildings since last October and had a new address, he seemed really confused and then told me that he couldn’t change the order or cancel it. He suggested that I call back the next day and someone else would be able to cancel it (what??). In the mean time he would put a note on there with the correct address and then gave me the reference number.

I called back today and got what sounded like an old southern grandma named Janet. She kept interrupting me as I tried to explain the situation, and then said, no everything was fine, even though it seemed like she just didn’t want to deal with the situation. I kept insisting that I was just doing as I was instructed to by the first person I had dealt with, and that I was trying to avoid them shipping something out to an empty address and causing more confusion. She suggested I call back in a few days.

/grrr

In a totally unrelated anecdote–last week we had our monthly staff meeting. It’s customary at these meetings to spend a moment or two appreciating anyone whose birthday occurs in that month. We missed our staff meeting in May, so last Tuesday they folded me into June. One of the staff members piped up with something like this:

“Brian, I appreciate you because you’re so multi-faceted. It’s like an onion, you have so many layers. In one layer, you’re the musician and the song writer, and then in another you’re the Gaming Quee…KING! I MEANT KING!”

Too late–the staff was howling with laughter. It took us about a full 60 seconds to recompose ourselves and move on. I’ve had to embrace my new title in the days that followed, since there’s no living it down. Good to know what people are really thinking on the inside.

–WG