I believe it’s my dad’s 51st birthday today, I say “I believe”, because my family has never been very big on actually remembering how old we each are. We pretty much just celebrate the day rather than the number, I blame my mom for this, she disguised her age for years, to the point where I couldn’t tell you with certainty how old she really is, and I’m her son.

Anyway, I haven’t actually bought my dad anything on a holiday for years, he’s very practical, the type of person that would get more use out of a good jucier than something expensive and useless. I decided to try and split the difference by buying him a nice pen, something chic and minimal that still had a practical uses.

I decided to go with a Lamby 2000 Fountain Pen, the price wasn’t ridiculous, but I really like the modern look of the pen and the few reviews I read about the writing quality all said good things. I paid a little extra to get it engraved, but I’m hoping he likes it.

I bought an xbox 360 when it first game out, maybe a year and a half ago now, well two months ago the system crapped out on me after weeks of stuttering. I called up Microsoft, and of course it was out of warranty, so I paid the 150 to have it sent out to be repaired. They have to send you a box, which you put your xbox in and send back to them, so the whole process takes over two weeks, they won’t even expedite the order for all that money.

Well I paid, waited, and got a system in return (whether it was a refurb unit or my same unit repaired, I’m not sure, but it certainly wasn’t new.) and everything seemed to be fine… until today. Less than 3 months after getting the “repaired” unit back, my xbox gave me another blinking red light and an error message. I call them up, and they give me some song and dance about how my system is out of the 90 day service warranty but they will do me a favor and repair it for free, though they once again refused to expedite the order.

On top of all this, apparently they just instated a new policy where service repairs get a free one year warranty, but since my first repair predated their new policy (by a measely 15 days), neither that nor my NEW repair will be covered under that policy? How does that make any sense? Wouldn’t this new service count as a new repair and get me that warranty, or are they just very intent on screwing their customers over?