How to Break an Xbox 360

I lived in NorCal this summer while I had an internship in Silicon Valley. Since the company I worked for gave me some money for shipping, I shipped some of my possessions from my dorm room such as my TV and Xbox. They made it to California perfectly alright and gave me a lot of satisfaction while I was out there. When it came time to ship it back, I left my box with a friend so he could put a few small items in there and then ship it for me. He choose to ship it with PostNet and $500 of insurance which turned out to be a terrible mistake.

August

When I received the package at school, I began dutifully unpacking my box and setting up everything inside. After plugging in my Xbox and TV, I discovered that the Xbox would turn on but not display video or produce sound. After a quick Google search, I discovered that the common cause for this was that the video card had died which is usually caused by heat exposure. I figured that my box had just been left on a tarmac somewhere. I calmly filed a report with UPS that my box had been damaged. The report was filed by UPS because that's what the shipping label had said.

September

After a long time of not hearing back from UPS, I tried checking their website, calling them and investigating my account. All of which provided me no new information. In fact, my account did not even have a record of the claim. After tweeting angrily about the claim, UPS help responded and had me email them. The support team had told me that the claim had been offloaded to PostNet and I should contact them, which I promptly did. PostNet responded that I needed to go to a repair vendor, such as Best Buy, and get a note about repair or replacement costs. Since Best Buy was not able to fix my Xbox, I sent back a note and a the cost of a replacement.

October

After not hearing from PostNet for a long time, I decided to call them and see what was happening. They told me that UPS would call me about sending a representative to examine the evidence and I thanked them again for their time. When UPS called me, they asked me if I still had the box. Since I live in a dorm room, I had thrown it out for space which was a mistake I admit. The UPS guy told me that was unfortunate but he would see what he could do with PostNet to help me out because I had insurance on the box.

November

After sending an email to PostNet, I called them to investigate the status of the claim. The manager informed me that the claim had been denied. I was mildly annoyed that they had decided to not tell me at all. The manager claimed that the UPS agent had told me my claim was denied. When I tried to tell him what the UPS agent had told me, the manager shut me down and was extremely unhelpful.

TL;DR

The moral of the story is don't ship with PostNet. Also, probably don't buy insurance on a package because it doesn't help anyway.

Notes