Device was strangely disabled during delivery
So, even though the situation is pretty self-explanatory, let me walk you through the whole thing first.
One fine evening, I placed an order for my little beauty: a Quest 3. Everything was perfectly normal while I was buying it — meaning, while I was filling out forms and handing over my money. Then came the waiting. Shipping didn't seem to have any problems either. Until the day.
As a customer in Taiwan (I'm not sure how customs works in other countries), I have to keep an eye on whether the package is currently going through customs, because I need to confirm it's mine. So I'd open the order page fairly often to check the progress. And that day, I opened the page, and I saw... this.
(Feel free to translate the text in the picture; the private info is already covered by those cool yellow blocks.)
For those of you who don't read Chinese, here's the short version:
One device in this order has been disabled.
Yep. Right when everything felt fine, I got this **bleep**.
At first I figured it might be some kind of security measure — maybe the device stays disabled until the expected delivery date. Wow. Great job, Meta.
Then the machine actually arrived, and starting it up was a disaster:
- Setup went fine right up until it started downloading updates from Meta's servers, at which point it dropped into a boot loop. Every official fix was either unavailable or useless. (And don't ask me "hey, did you try—". I will be mad at you. Whatever you're thinking of, I tried it, it didn't work, and I'm too frustrated to list them all.)
- Eventually a friend who knows more about this than I do helped me get past the update problem. My Quest 3 could finally update... but it still couldn't link to the Horizon app. We both did our best to find a solution. Nothing.
At that point the only option left was contacting Meta support. That was the final disaster.
The reply I got claims it was written by a human. What this "human" wrote was: my own problem, repeated back to me AGAIN, followed by a canned solution that any actual HUMAN who read my message would instantly know has nothing to do with what I described — and finally, a request that I attach my order serial number, which they could absolutely find themselves by filtering recent records by my name.
So yes: I got an AI-generated template email that also wants me to believe a person wrote it. (Or at least, it never says anything like "this is an automated message, please do not reply.")
At this point I'm furious at Meta, and there's nothing I can do except send them the order information. And yeah — I don't even know if they'll ever read my reply, because they never said whether the conversation continues, where it continues, or how to send them anything else. NOTHING.
So right now, I would kindly ask whether an actual human employee from Meta Quest support could handle this problem — and handle my anger. I'd appreciate it enormously.
To make sure my request is clear enough, the response I'm expecting should answer the following questions:
- Can this "disabled" status prevent the headset from booting up at all?
- How did I end up in this situation in the first place? You're welcome to tell me it's my own fault — as long as you explain why. Or just tell me you're not sure what happened, which I'd also accept.
- Before we get to refunding, is there anything else I can do to fix this?
Oh, right. You might also want to run an "are you human" test on whoever handled my ticket. I have a feeling you may have accidentally hired a robot.