Mr. Gates, I am irate.

My beloved XBOX360's RoL is flashing the three red lights of death. The RoL is the Ring of Light, which is usully a beauitiful lime color when the console is powered on.

Nathan and I settled in around my computer monitor to play a nice round of Need for Speed Most Wanted before we went to bed one night last week when we saw red. Sometimes 360 owners can save their agony when the entire ring flashes red, knowing they probably forgot to connect a cable. The three red lights, the top right quarter unlit, means an internal hardware failure. Usually I'd just smack the thing like I used to do to my Sega, but I simply can't bring myself to.

Sadly after much research I discovered the only fix is to send the baby off to Texas, where Microsoft will determine if they can repair it or simply send me a new one. Please, send me a new one. Please, oh, please.

The 360 was one of the first things Nathan bought with his first paycheck from T-Mobile. Okay, so yes it is technically his. I can refer to it as mine because it takes up my desk space in my room. It doesn't move from that spot. Sometimes he even pays more attention to it than he does to me. I'm guilty for that as well. Sh.

We followed the automated tutorial to try and fix the poor thing, which consisted of removing the hard drive. That didn't work, of course. Then Nate found himself in a half-hour long conversation with a lonely Microsoft customer care represenative. All he had to tell Nate was to ship it to [this address] and tell him why-- a 5 minute conversation, tops. The guy wound up asking Nate about our gaming habits and what games we have.

"Yeah, we were just about to play that," I hear him say to the rep. "We're on the last guy actually, which is even worse."

"Yes, Razor."

So now we have to pay to ship the 360 to Texas, and wait for 10 days. Business days, I'm sure. There is a void in my weekend late-nights, and I am extremely mad. We have an intercooler, all the discs are clean, it's never played for more than 2 hours at a time. It isn't even a year old!

Bill, I am not happy.

Neither is Nathan, or our friends.

Or the hundreds of people I read about having the same problem when I visited only two blogs about it.

I think my brother almost got sick when he found out.