What next?

I am off to a GREAT start this week. My wife was in a minor car accident on Monday morning. She is completely fine but her vehicle is going to need some work and is not currently driveable. It was the other douche's fault, so our insurance won't be picking up the tab, but the downside is we have to wait for his insurance company to get their act together before we can get the car fixed. Of course we COULD go ahead and get it fixed, pay for it ourselves, and THEN try to get reimbursed, but that is always way more of a hassle than just waiting it out and carpooling until they get around to handling our case. So I've got this fantastic clusterfrak to look forward to over the next week or two. Yippee.

So, Monday sucked big time, but Mondays usually do and that knowledge somewhat softened the blow. I wasn't really prepared for Tuesday though. I had fired up my 360 on Sunday afternoon for a bit and played some single-player CoD4 for about an hour. The game gave me a disc read error the first time I tried to run it, but I just ejected the disc, put it back in, and it worked without a fuss. I didn't get a chance to play anything on Monday, but last night I had a couple of free hours and thought I would get on and game with my friends, crossing my fingers and hoping that Xbox Live would be behaving better and that I could actually get into a game.

I need not have worried about Xbox Live, because I didn't even get that far. My 360's disc drive wasn't able to read ANY of my game discs. It wasn't even trying to run them at all. I'd put in a game disc (I tried all 6 that I own) and the dashboard would say "Reading…" but then the message would change back to "Open Tray" after a couple of seconds. The damned thing was acting like there wasn't even a disc IN THE FRAKIN' TRAY!!!

I looked around online and tried some different tricks, like removing your hard drive and rebooting, patting your head while rubbing your tummy, etc. but no dice. After futzing around with it for about half an hour I realized I would just have to request a "coffin" and send off for repairs. This is just frakin' rediculous.

My 360 was manufactured only 6 months ago and I don't play it that much. When I do play (maybe once or twice a week) it is usually for less than an hour. And a lot of times I've been playing Carcassonne with my wife and that doesn't even USE THE DISC DRIVE! My gahdamned gamerscore is 750, so it is painfully obvious that the 360 disc drive did not fail because of overuse. And I don't abuse the hardware. The machine has always been laid flat and has only been moved TWICE since I brought it home from the store. What I'm saying is that my 360 has to be one of the most lightly used and pristine gaming consoles ON EARTH and yet it has died on me. Frak you Microsoft.

As I was filling out the online forms to request a coffin for my gaming machine I realized that I was doing PRECISELY what I had most feared I would be doing. On the day I bought the 360 and Halo 3, a day that SHOULD have been nothing but fun, I had this nagging sense of impending doom that cast a dark cloud over the whole experience. Sure, I had fun, but deep down I knew that the day would come when I would regret that I had ever sent any of my hard earned monies in the direction of MacroShaft. And yesterday that day finally came to pass.

In a couple of days (or maybe weeks if I get unlucky like SoupNazi) I'll get my 360 "coffin" and send if off for repair. And then several days (or weeks) later I'll get it back, and what I will have then is a repaired piece of dogshit excuse for a gaming console. Man, I just CANNOT wait. It is going to be so awesome.

**EDIT**
By the way, I've started watching Battlestar Gallactica and I'm trying to soften up my language a bit by using the word "frak" instead of .... well, you know.  My wife appreciates it.