So my girlfriend is pretty much obsessed with her Nintendog. So obsessed she decided that walking him and brushing her teeth or washing her face or whatever girls do over a running sink full of water was a great idea and dropped the her pink puppy paw DS into the sink. Thsi made the think stop working (probably an issue with the batter, we'll find out soon). Normally I would only mind a little but since she brings the Nintendog to work she has no confiscated my DS during the day and left me without any portable entertainment to fulfill my needs.

Thus I had to brave the waters of consumer support! Fearful of jumping in I waited a week, hoping that the DS would magically pop to life and possibly do a jig. No jig happened and the damn thing lay dormant, mocking me. I paced in front of it. I had heard tales of the horrors of dealing with people over the phone when a system has crashed. Sure most of them were from Microsoft, but Nintendo was probably just as bad. Who knew what evils they would commit to my ear. The lies they would spread into my easily impressionable brain until I was agreeing that not having the DS for the next two years while it was in repair was perfectly normal and that, yes, maybe I would rather play WiiPingPong than MadWorld.

Finally, I bit the bullet calling the nefarious 800 number and popping in a DVD that I hoped would last long enough to sustain me through the time I was going to be on old. Then, after navigating the the electronic menu system by skipping it entirely, the strangest thing happened. I went right through. Shocked, I fumbled with my phone, dropped it on the floor and hung up. Fine, it wasn't shock, I'm just clumsy. Still on my second call back I got right through again.

In under five minutes not only had the kind woman gotten me a discount for the DS being under warrenty despite the fact that I had failed to register the thing and they didn't have the serial number in their records but she also set it up so that if the battery was the only problem I wouldn't have to pay shipping fee. Thus I am getting a new battery mailed to me along with the shipping items for repair. If the battery works then I'm all done, if not I just ship it to them and they'll deduct the cost of the battery from my overall price.

I guess this is the type of service one should expect but after hearing so many horror stories about dealing with customer service people in the gaming industry I was expecting a bit more tug of war with this. So I don't suppose they should get my thanks for doing their job well since it is their job but it was surprisingly painless.