Monday, January 25, 2010

The Great Netflix Mystery

We bought a BluRay DVD a few months ago. It offered a startup plan with Netflix with both streaming and by-mail movies. We've enjoyed it more than I thought we would. It has been very handy to have some movies instantly...and in fact, you can start a movie, decide you don't want it, and then find another one that would be better at no extra charge. Just pull another off of the online que you have established.

BluRay and newer movies are available only by mail. You set up a priority listing online and then they send you one movie at a time. You watch the movie and then mail the DVD back to Netflix. They mail you the next thing on your list. All of this is probably old school to most of you. For years I was afraid it would be a subscription which we would not use to its fullest, so I didn't subscribe because I was too cheap to commit to a monthly fee. But now we are onboard.

We got the first movie, Julie and Julia, watched it and then returned it. No problem. We were notified that the second movie was headed our way, Changeling. But that was just a day or so before our trip to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. So when we returned and unpacked I looked through our mail for that movie. No such luck.

Since my mother had been here with our three children during our trip (bless her) I thought maybe she might know something about it. No luck again. No child admitted to seeing the movie. No surprise. So I kept looking through our clutter for the misplaced movie.

And then....
We got an email saying Changeling had been returned to Netflix.
What? Huh?

Dave and I were perplexed. We had not even watched the movie, nor seen it with our eyes. Yet, it was returned. I've come up with a few scenarios:

  • Someone just reached in our mailbox and took the obviously marked envelope.
  • It got lost in the mail.
  • The movie was misplaced into someone else's mailbox, they watched it, and then nicely returned it. Perhaps not even knowing that it was not a movie from their Netflix account.

We notified Netflix. They resent Changeling and it arrived on Saturday. We watched it last night and enjoyed it. So, as we return this movie I guess we'll see what happens on the next mailing. To whomever viewed and then returned our first mailing, I say thank you! Thank goodness you returned the movie and didn't keep it. The Great Netflix Mystery continues....

2 comments:

Claudia said...

Malicious mailman. My explanation for every mail dilema, and we seem to have quite a few.

Ann said...

So you are saying that the mail-person took it, watched it, and then returned it? That is completely plausible! I missed that possibility. Good one Claudia!