Last Friday, Norman Junior III emerged from his bedroom, looked mournfully at me and pronounced in a quiet voice: ‘Dad - I’ve got the three red rings of death.’
‘Just have an aspirin and sit down quietly for a bit. Your mum will be back soon.’
‘No Dad - not me. It’s my XBox. It has the dreaded three red rings of death and won’t boot.’
And so we embarked on a prolonged saga that involved a fruitless hunt for a two year old receipt that revealed plenty of interesting long lost items but not the actual receipt from Game.
Then I contacted Microsoft about the prospect of repairing a faulty console that was out of warranty and had subsequently fallen by £100 in price.
Much to my surprise, Microsoft told me that, for this specific hardware fault, the warranty had been extended to three years.
Microsoft checked the date of manufacture from the serial number, confirmed the box was eligible for the extended warranty and asked me to courier the faulty console, free of charge, back to their service centre in Frankfurt, near Germany for repair.
Microsoft sent me the necessary paperwork to ship the XBox to Germany using UPS. In turn, UPS sent me a package label, invoice, receipt and an export certificate.
I then booked an appointment with UPS to collect the games console at my convenience.
And all of this was accomplished without speaking to a single human being - except for Norman Junior III who is doing well and making a fine recovery after going ‘Cold Turkey’ from Call Of Duty.
It all sounds too good to be true…