The Xbox Kinect Debacle of Christmas 2010 – Part 2

If you missed Part 1 of this edge-of-your-seat drama, you can click here.  Or, you can be satisfied with this summary:  I ordered a 250 GB Xbox Kinect last November from Microsoft.  They told me it was on its way, and then they told me I was never going to get it because they found out that I have a house full of Apple products.  At least that is the reason that I suspect.

Resolved to get the Xbox Kinect with 250 GB of memory (because the 4 GB version just seemed too easy to acquire and it not worth buying if it’s not a pain in the rear to find), no matter what, I resorted to eBay.  Normally, I love eBay.  But I had avoided it at first b/c I think ordering expensive electronics that way is full of potential pitfalls.  Also, it was about $150.00 more.

After much research, I found someone with 99.2134567% customer satisfaction who had been a seller since I was a baby, and hadn’t had any complaints in the last 6 hours at least.

I won’t tell you how much I paid.

Back on track again, I sighed, and stretched back in my office chair as all of the other poor late-shopping fools raced around looking for the perfect Christmas gift.

A couple of days later, I got my e-mail that the Xbox Kinect 250 GB game was on its way from my super reliable eBay seller.

The next day, I got an e-mail from Microsoft that my Xbox Kinect 250 GB game that I had ordered from them (the one they had said was CANCELLED and would never be sent to me even if I paid them a million bucks and danced naked in Times Square) was on its way.

Let’s summarize – 1 Xbox Kinect from Microsoft, then 0 Xbox Kinect from Microsoft, 1 Xbox Kinect from eBay, AND 1 Xbox Kinect from Microsoft.

For those of you without my mathematical genius, that would be 2 Xbox Kinects.  500 GB of memory.  And a credit card bill for $100,000 give or take.

In the meantime, I had been worried the whole time that Cap’n Firepants might have ordered one to surprise the family – making a total of 3 Xbox Kinect games – one for each person in our household.  This would kind of defeat my whole purpose of bringing the family together to play.

In full panic mode, exacerbated by the fact that I could not mention the reason for my increasing anxiety to Cap’n Firepants, I wielded my wonderful assertiveness on the phone to Microsoft, with the goal of getting a free Xbox Kinect.

I managed to get two free Kinect games to play on our potential 3 boxes.

Both Kinect systems arrived within a day of each other.  I wrapped the one from eBay and put it under the Christmas tree.  I glared at the other one, and finally stuck it in my perpetually full dry-cleaning basket with the intention of one day finding it a home at an exorbitant price through Craig’s List.

Christmas Day arrived, and the Cap’n and Dimples were suitably impressed by the gift.  In fact, Dimples said, “This is so cool!  I’ve never seen anything like this before,” once it was set up.

“What do you mean?” I asked.  “You and Dad saw it on a commercial, and said how great it was.  You both couldn’t stop talking about it!”

“We did?” they said in unison.

It turns out that I had wasted my time for two months.  I should have been looking for a family with more memory instead of a game system with more memory.

Thanks Otacon 9944 on Photobucket!

 

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