Don’t try this at home: One sure-fire way to disrupt your Netflix service

Even if you are not a current Netflix subscriber, please hear me out for future reference.

I can sing praises about Netflix for hours. It is inexpensive, easy to use and there are a ton of titles to choose from. I have even looked for some obscure movies and almost every time I find out that they have it available. If they don't, chances are it is either out of print or hasn’t come out on DVD yet – or it’s an animated Disney movie.

At any rate, you may have noticed a little lull in our Netflix movie history recently. Due to work, holidays, school and other things, we haven’t had much time to sit down and watch a lot of movies. In fact, the last three movies from our queue (The Last Picture Show, Eight Below and Employee of the Month) all came to us on the same day – November 14th.

Sometime in the 10-day period between the 14th and the 24th, we happened to lose all three pre-paid envelopes. This would go unnoticed until I was heading out the door for work on Monday morning when I realized there were no envelopes to be found.

Nor did they magically appear when I went home and looked again on my lunch break.

So I did some digging on the Netflix site to find out what I should do since I no longer had any return envelopes. You have to dig for a while to find out that you need to mail them to their offices in San Jose, California.

I now know why it took me a while to find the information – because you shouldn’t do it that way. They could at least give you a warning and tell you to do this at a last resort. If at all possible, find someone else you can get an envelope from so you won’t have to wait seemingly forever for you next movies.

I stopped by the post office on Tuesday afternoon to mail the discs back to San Jose – which probably bypassed about 30 Netflix warehouses in the process. It only cost me .57 cents, so that wasn’t too bad.

What was bad, though, was the waiting for confirmation that they had received the movies. It was late Friday morning when I had finally gotten an e-mail saying they received Eight Below and Employee of the Month.

That sounded good to me – they can ship out my next two movies on Friday and I’ll get them on Saturday. Before I got too excited, though, I watched my queue go from “shipping next movie today,” to “shipping next movie by Monday,” in a matter of minutes.

Thus, a week later I am still waiting for the next two movies to get here as I hold on to a movie I refuse to send back without a pre-paid envelope that was watched last Friday night.

We really have no one to blame but ourselves for losing the envelopes, but the lesson has been learned. I can’t wait to get back on track.

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