After verifying it was a true red ring of death and taking a picture, I immediately called Microsoft and was routed to an outsourced call center.  During this conversation, I started to talk with the outsourced support agent.  The agent kept telling me “Thank you for your problem” and then couldn’t stop telling me “thank you,” “Please be patient,” and “We will solve you”. Seemed really odd, but hilarious.

After 45 minutes of waiting on hold for the outsourced call center agent to find a solution, he finally came back on the line with an answer of “Thank you for your problem and I am glad to solve you.” Trying to hold back my laughter, I said, “How did you solve me?”

The outsourced call center agent said, “Your device is out of warranty, but we have extended it to solve your problem and will fix it.”  The only thing I would have to do is get my own box for shipping the system back to them.

I found myself relating this whole experience to a movie I recently watched called “Outsourced.” In the movie, a company outsourced their call center to India. Which seems to be exactly what Microsoft has done with their support.  One part of the call was extremely familiar, because I asked the support rep where he was located and he told me Chi…caaaaa..go. That was one of the classic scenes in the “Outsourced” movie itself.

Outsourcing is Bad for American business. Outsourced call centers are even worse for a hard American worker like myself to deal with. Just dealing with a rep about a broken product is difficult enough in itself, but add an extreme language barrier of an outsourced call center agent and you’ve created and instantly unbearable situation.

One company that I highly respect, Apple, hasn’t resorted to outsourcing their call centers to a foreign county. Apple seems to know that customer service and the ability to understand the representative your talking to is vitally important to keeping customers.

What’s new you ask?  Well not much, other then a new item on the sidebar called applications, at first I got excited and looked to see if the App Store was online, and disappointedly it was not!

Speaking of the app store I’m totally excited to see what’s there.  I’m really looking forward to a twitterriffic application or better yet a socialthing! application.

I’m curious as to whether or not Apple will release the new firmware for the iPhone tomorrow, or wait until the launch date of the iPhone 3G.

Well nothing to exciting to see tonight from Apple, Ill probably miss it all later tonight.

Apple likes to call it “Exchange for the rest of us”.  I call it plain cool.

Mobile me appears to be launching July 9th from 6 p.m until 12 a.m. PT,  Apple has just updated the .Mac status page with that date/time for the .Mac to MobileMe switch. So, for those of you wondering when Apple might start the switch, you will not have to wonder any longer.Apple says that during the switch, users will be unable to access www.mac.com or any .Mac services, with the exception of .Mac Mail accessed via a desktop application.

Apple also says it hopes to have mobile me available as soon possible during the maintenance times, lets all hope so.

For those of you looking to purchase a mobile me subscription, look to amazon.com they are offering mobile me for $89.99 a whole $10.00 cheaper then Apple.

I’ll try to stay on top of this launch but with all the excitement I might forget.