The repair center is in Texas right? Could there be a slight possibility that the people actually fixing the console cant' SPEAK or READ ENGLISH?!? Senorita's job is to wipe down the console. She doesn't know any better since none of those names or art is recognizable to her. She was doing her job and ya it sucks.

Man, maybe the kid will quit playing and cherishing it so much, I mean lugging it around everywhere you go? "Oh I have quite fond memories with it" that's kind of sad if your best memories of the last two years is with a piece of hardware.

Maybe the kid will realize how dumb he was being.

 Correct!

What probably happened... was that the person at the tech center got the system, then asked their superior if they should still clean it. Their superior foolishly said they should, just be careful. They proceeded to clean it and ended up smearing the marker, ruining the artwork and making it look really awful. They then decided that the best course of action was to clean it off as best as possible, figuring that whatever these signatures were, they could likely be replaced.

Although, I agree that all this culture over the Halo franchise is ridiculous. I'm personally sick of freaking Halo tournaments, "professional" Halo players, etc. It's not like it's that revolutionary of a game. Maybe kid needed this blow to get a kick back to reality.

The bigger smudge they red circled on the post-clean pic is in a place where there was no signature to begin with.

^ dude you fail


have you ever cleaned anything in your life or do you just ignore it???

b/c if you have they you would know that when you wipe of something like permanent marker with a cleaning agent it smears it around ....so that could have been the smudge from a name on the other side of the box but the residue was left there


face it i know you love yous a micosoft but pop the teet out of your moth and see that they royally booned this poor dude

Actually Shio isn't a 360 fanboy and I think he's right based on the photographs. The only thing I can think of if it is the same case and the person is telling the truth is that the original pictures are old and more signatures had been added to the case between the time it was taken and when the console went sent in for repairs.

Customer service does a poor job? Shocking, I tell you...

The guy clearly took a gamble with sending his console down there. While I feel sympathy for him, at some level he must have known this could happen.

Unfortunately, MS isn't a 20-person company... they have 10's of thousands of employees, not including the fact that this was likely sent to a 3rd party for repair.  The MS rep probably thought that putting a comment in the repair order field on his/her screen would have been enough to make sure the right thing happened, but in a company as big as sprawling as MS things are going to get miscommunicated, overlooked, etc.  If they're repairing thousands of consoles, then it's one console isn't likely to get a lot of special treatment.

That all being said, I really feel sorry for the guy, and I'm a little frustrated with him at the same time.  Not because I think he's stupid, but it's like when your kid does something that really causes a lot of pain to himself, and you wish you could have helped him avoid it.  Had I been a friend of this guy and he had told me what he planned to do, I would have pleaded with him *not* to send in the broken console, but to find a way to buy a replacement console and then switch the case or just put the old one in a display case.  What this guy did would be like me going on vacation in Hollywood, running into a bunch of high profile actors at a restaurant who allow me to take pictures of them with my film camera, and then sending the film off to be developed through Sam's Club.  It doesn't matter what letter I send with that film, it's likely to get no special treatment in the best case, and it might get stolen in the worst case.

If there is any moral to this story then perhaps it is "don't send your prized artwork to a pciture-frame factory to have a crack in the frame repaired."

^ummmmm where else was he supposed to send it?

yep i stand by that looks like a smear and not a spot where it needed to be signed