Curious Events and an XBox 360

The story of my dead xbox, intertwined with someone's attempt to (I believe) defraud Gamestop...

Our story begins Sunday 1/14, with our hero (that would be me) very frustrated at a bad run of online poker, and looking to put a hurt on someone's virtual face. That is, I wanted to fire up my XBox 360, pop in Fight Night 3 to rough some people up. Unfortunately, the game locked up while in the menu system. I had started experiencing lockups the day before while playing Blitz: The League, and thought it was game-related. Turns out this signaled the beginning of the end for my 360. After several reboots, I got the dreaded 3 red lights, signaling general hardware failure.

I called Microsoft XBox support, who told me I was in luck ... my warranty was (jut barely) still in effect, because Microsoft had recently extended all warranties to 1 year (from the original 90 days). I was given a reference # and told they were shipping me an empty box. I am to place the broken 360 into the box, send it to them, wait a week, and I should have a spiffy new one. I'm still waiting for the box.

Fast forward to Wednesday 1/17. I got 2 emails from Gamestop.com saying my order had shipped (in two separate boxes) on 1/16, and was due for delivery today. Say wha? I didn't know why Gamestop was getting involved in my warranty replacement, nor why I was getting two boxes instead of just one empty one, but whatever. I made note of the UPS tracking numbers, and checked them a couple times during the day.

At around 3:30pm, both boxes showed as "delivered", and signed for by someone named "Davis" at 3:00pm. At this point, I noticed they were shipped to Lewisville, TX, and I live in Irving. I had seen Lewisville on the screen before, but I assumed what I was looking at was the origin, not the destination. I'm pretty sure Gamestop is in Lewisville. Somewhere around here, anyway.

Confused, I called Gamestop customer service, but they were closed. The weather was crappy and the roads were bad all around the Metroplex, so they closed their office that day.

When I went back to the emails they sent, I noticed an order number (I had previously fixated on the link to UPS tracking), so I went to the Gamestop web page to look up the order. This is where it got interesting. It was my original order for the 360 bundle I bought last January (2006), but at the bottom, there was an additional 360 and 2 additional controllers. Both were marked as $0.00, and there were tracking numbers for them that matched my emails. Further down the page were the billing and shipping addresses for my account. Billing was correct, but Shipping had someone else's address in there, for Lewisville, TX. (NOTE to all readers: if something like this happens to you, get a screenshot! I didn't, and I very much wish I had.)

This morning I called Gamestop customer support. While waiting for them to answer, I brought that page back up so I could talk to them about it. The address had changed back to my own.

I explained the story so far and was told someone would call me back. I got a call back from someone concerned about my dead XBox. Yes, I'm concerned about that too, but now what I'm more concerned about is someone appears to be defrauding Gamestop via my account/order. What I got out of the 2nd rep was that someone had called Gamestop Customer Support several days ago to arrange a return, and changed the address on the account to the Lewisville address. Then, yesterday afternoon (while Customer Support was closed, and after the 3pm UPS delivery time), they received an email asking them to change the address again -- back to my address.

To me, this is several events randomly coming together at the right time to create something very confusing:
1) My XBox decided to die on Sunday
2) The defrauder wasn't smart enough to also change the email address. (S)he probably didn't know an email would be sent
3) The weather closure of the customer service office
4) The customer service rep not being alert to the fact that an address change, return, and address change again, all within a few days of each other, is very suspect activity.

I'm still waiting for the Gamestop Fraud department to call me back with their findings. It seems like they should be able to track down the little bastard via the address given to UPS (since they don't appear to still have it in their system). Oh, and I'm still waiting for my empty box from Microsoft. All this talk about 360's while I'm not able to play mine depresses me.

Stay tuned for updates...

Gone Fishin'

I just got a fish tank back the other day. When I moved into the house, I had picked up a 100 gallon tank and gave the 44 gallon pentagon to my friend John. Now he's moving back to Boston, so I get it back.

The filter on it was shot, so I ended up replacing it with a Fluval 405. That thing rocks! The water was crystal clear overnight, despite considerable cloudiness from the move. I also replaced all the decor and put in some fake plants.

Now I just need some fish to die. Terrible thing to say, I know. But, John mostly had Tetras in there (a lone neon, several black skirts, some white clouds, etc) and I want bigger fish ... fish that view tetras as lunch. I actually lost 3 by accident in a filter mishap (the piece that keeps fish from being sucked in was inadvertently left at John's house), and there's one that apparently lost its swim bladder a couple weeks before I took the tank (but he's still alive and kicking!) so it may not be too long.

I'm thinking Cichlids this time around. They're supposed to have a lot of personality, and they can be pretty colorful. There's a very cute manager at the local Petsmart ... maybe she can help me pick out appropriate fish.

Christmas and New Year's

For Christmas and New Years, I was in Kure Beach, NC, visiting my father and his wife Kathleen. My sister Heather, her husband Adam, and her 3 boys (Joshua, Elijah, and Joseph) made the trip up from Florida for the same time period. I'm trying something new this time ... rather than host the pictures on server, I'm using Google's PicasaWeb. If it works out well, I'll move all my pics to their server.

The trip to the go kart place was for Elijah's birthday. Most of these pictures are from Christmas day, with most of the rest from New Year's Eve. We had a great time, and made some great friends ... some of which I hope to see again soon...

Click here for the pictures.