So. I wake up this a.m. and turn on my 360, & try to log in to check my messages. It says I can't log in. I think, "Oh, yeah. System maintenance is today." I wait a couple of hours and try again. Still no go. I check & make sure my husband's acct can log in on our other console (which it does), make sure everything is connected properly to my console (which it is), & try again. Nothing. I reset my gateway and the 360 itself. Clear the cache & try again. Nope.

I break down and call customer support. Guy #1 says a lot of people are experiencing the problem. He gives me a reference # and says to try again in an hour and if it still doesn't work to call them back. An hour later I'm stll having the same problem, so I call back. Guy #2 keeps me on the phone for 3 HOURS having me do everthing I've already tried. Then we move to "Phase Two". He has me create a dummy account and recover that. That works.

Long story short. He puts me on the phone with Guy #3 who tells me that the problem is severe and needs to move to "Phase Three". MS needs to recover my account internally in order to figure out what the problem is. He then proceeds to explain that this process will take 3-5 business days and there is a good chance I will need to start a new tag and purchase a new gold membership, but they will "do their best to fix my current tag." In the meantime, he tells me to occasionally try to recover my tag and "...maybe you'll get lucky."

Needless to say, at the moment 'mad' doesn't even begin to describe it. If I have to start from scratch, SOMEONE is gonna pay! Over half a year left on my gold membership, hundreds of dollars in downloadable content, microsoft points still on my account, 75 friends on my list I won't be able to recover, not to mention over 22,000 gamerpoints and two years worth of gamesaves...

Yeah, I'm a bit miffed at the moment.