<rant>

I hardly ever use XBox live anymore so it’s just not worth the $50 a year. I logged into the Dashboard and located my XBox Live membership info. I looked all over for the cancel membership button but couldn’t find it. Okay, plan B: just change my billing info so that they can’t bill my credit card. Nope, you can’t do that online. More looking around and I couldn’t find anything about canceling a membership, anywhere.

I got on the computer and went to XBox.com and started looking around. After a bit of searching and many dead ends I finally found a contact number: (800) 4MY-XBOX (800 469-9269). It seems that the only way to cancel a membership is to call them. What does this remind you of? ( AOL anyone? )

Fortunately I get a custormer rep. on the phone pretty quick. He starts asking me info about my account like, “What is your gamerTag?” No problem, I know that: fiveSigmaEvent. Then he asks me what the email address is for my XBox Live account. That, I have no idea. So I have to go upstairs and start up the console, after plugging in the Ethernet cable. I’m not familiar with the new dashboard so it takes a while to locate my email address. I come back downstairs and tell him. Then he needs the final 4 digits on my credit card. That takes a while to find and I get that to him. ( Aside: the credit card that XBox has on file hasn’t been active for well over a year so how did they automatically renew me last year? )

The rep. finally has all the info that he needs to cancel my account and, wait for it, he offers me 500 Microsoft points to keep my membership. Like what in the frak are $500 Microsoft worth? Let me tell you, when I was working there and they came up with the MS points thing we would all roll our eyes. Everyone on the team, and I mean EVERYONE, was against it. But we got trumped by the marketing team.

That brings up another rant topic: the marking department at Microsoft is the biggest joke in the known universe, right? I mean if you met someone who worked for MS Marketing wouldn’t you just have to laugh at them? They get their ass handed to them every time they come out with a new idea. They remind me of the Marketing Department at the Sirius Cybernetics corp:

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, page 50

Which begs the question: why on earth would anyone listen to this bunch of bozos? I generally find people who work for marketing departments to be pretty worthless - the only good marketing people I’ve met are all freelancers. But the MS Marketing team is so bad that if you could build a marketing strategy around doing the opposite of what they suggest you might just have a winner.

In closing: anyone else out there thinking about creating a service/subscription and making people jump through hoops in order to cancel it: if it happens to me you’ll get a negative blog post up the ass!

</rant>

polyGeek rant, Xbox

You know that scene in 2010 when Floyd asks Chandra to reprogram HAL to return to Earth early because of the new “feature” they discovered on Jupiter? Think back to Chandra’s reaction. He’s calm and responds, “Well, I just finished programing HAL for a 1000 day return trip back to Earth and now you want me to scrap all that and reprogram HAL for …

Nope, Chandra would have reacted more like this, “Are you fraking kidding me? Do you know how hard it is to program a holistic computer? I’ve had to hack my code so many times because of your screw ups that it’s become a house of cards in there. No wonder HAL went nuts. You’ve got code telling to do all sorts of contradictory things.”

Fifteen minutes later he would be sitting at a console, sipping an espresso, and mumbling to himself, “Okay, I’ll just comment this code out and then make this class dynamic . . . I think this is going to work. . . ”

Yeah, nothing like this has never happened to me.

polyGeek rant