Inhuman Swill

I was frustrated to see this too. I'm going to miss my weekly shipments of Tarkovsky and blaxsploitation. Their price point makes having two separate accounts for the same number of DVDs more than I plan to pay for their service.

Bastard shareholders.

I'm not sure I'll even continue my subscription. I used to be on the three-a-month unlimited plan, with a queue for movies and a queue for whatever TV series I was watching all of. But their shipment delays and screwy way of handling queues meant that even if I had two discs dedicated to the TV show I often had no new episodes to watch. (And their customer service is awful; I don't think it's possible to email them at all any more.)

It's actually cheaper to buy series box sets on eBay, and resell them when I'm finished watching. So I do that now, and I changed my Netflix plan to the one-movie-at-a-time two-per-month plan. Which still probably costs more than it's worth.

I'm disappointed too, I would think they'd want to encourage people to do more with profiles what with the popularity of social networking and all that rot. Of course they have done that and I don't know how many people actively recommend or review movies to their friends on there, etc.

It was neat for kaustin and I to have separate profiles with separate queues and reviews etc. I'll miss it. And I am curious what's behind the decision.

Have been cutting back on my use of Netflix anyway, so may just give it up.

I find it a baffling decision. I can't imagine why it would make anything harder or more complicated for them, so it must be an effort to get people to buy two separate subscriptions, which is kind of nuts.

I can see not wanting to pay to develop a new feature, but they already have this one. In the immortal words of Cookie Monster, "That dumb thing to do."

Bill, don't get me started. Modern corporations bigger than a shoe-box are all about insulating management from feedback of any kind.

Instead of incompetent people, we now have incompetent robots. I have spent the better part of three days trying to open a joint checking account with my sister to manage the bills for a condo we inherited from my mom. FirstMerit (I refuse to hide the name) has sent me repeated e-mails saying that I have given incomplete or false information. Incomplete? They wanted everything but my bra size. I spent almost an hour yesterday on a three-way connection with customer service during which they told me I had to use my sister's address (which seems to me a form of "inaccurate" information), but today at 4:38 AM, I received one more e-mail from FirstMerit saying I had provided "incomplete or false information." I went in again myself this time, believing that I probably have as much experience beating up on bad bots as the wet-behind-the-ears bank employee. But now the website wants five days to decide if I gave them the *exact* incorrect information they desire.

So, problem not solved, but at least delayed until next week.

I will not bore you with the largely wetware interface needed to deal with the safety recall (fire hazard) in my car; since these were humans, they might lie, but at least they don't just clam up and make me go back to square one.

Next, I tried to see if my trip with Geoff to Baltimore allowed me time to drop the car off. And discovered that somehow, despite the fact that I had paid with a credit card, Continental did not deign to actually *reserve* me a seat on their fine Cleveland to Baltimore flight. So I had to re-reserve the trip, at an additional cost of only (I hope) $60. I am trusting that the nice wetware in India is right that I won't be charged twice for the same itinerary.

I apologized to the nice wetware that came to check out my AC this morning, saying sorry everything is so messy, and then I realized I have to handle banking services for six different entities, plus all the other detritus that gets dumped in my mailbox and slouches to the top of my dining room table. My mother at my age did not have to deal with this blizzard of paper.

And none of the hundreds of entities that are on the opposite end of my entities provide me with a method of complaining!

I have a book here called A PERFECT MESS. The authors (Eric Anderson and David Freedman) are right; we have to just give up. The stuff that's thrown at us us just too much for humans to handle.

I tried to comment in the F&SF blog this morning and discovered I not only have to register, I have to wait 24 hours to get *permission* to register.

Then there is the new CD player in my car which uses the word SOURCE to indicate that I want to turn it on and an odd kanji to pause it. I would write to the company telling them that the word SOURCE does not mean ON in my language, but how would I contact them? And would they be truly grateful?

Just try to tell those NetFlix folks what you really want. What are you, some kind of a terrorist, that you want to complain about something that a Divine Entity like a Corporation does?