Not even a month ago I posted about the hardware difficulties I was having with my PSP. It's a long story, but I can make it short: Display key janked, Select and Home keys useless, Browser out-of-comission, device returned to Sony for in-warranty repair.

And now here it is, less than a month later, and I have a new PSP in hand. And when I say new, I do mean scratch-free, new-car-smelling, solidly, brilliantly, brand-spanking, out-of-the-box new. But here's the best part: it was only last Monday that Sony received the device. By Wednesday I'd had an email come with a UPS tracking number, and here today, just four days later, a PSP rests quietly on the desk beside me. Frankly, if I hadn't been so lazy about getting the thing to UPS in the first place, the turn-around for this whole thing would've been less than two weeks. (Note to self: less fainéant, more diligent, greater happiness in life.)

Now, I hate to sound like a corporate shill, but it has to be said: Sony did do right by me. Really, from start to finish, from the initial, hopeful trip to Gamestop to try to get my hands on a copy of the receipt to the UPS driver and the Sony service center, it's been a pretty positive consumer experience. And those, my friends, are words you don't very often find in blogs and forum posts around the web. Yeah, sure, it's not so positive that the thing broke in the first place, but I have to be candid here: I dropped that poor thing at least three times and dropped it hard. I almost -- just almost -- feel a pang of guilt about having a replacement at all.

When's the last time you dropped your PSP?