Netflix has pissed me off for the last time.  My only regret is that I didn’t cancel them completely at the end of August.  Netflix was a great concept, then they got cocky.  Yeah, yeah, you are going to tell me that movie producers and God forced their hand to jack up prices.  Or that they are having contract troubles and that is why their streaming sucks so hard.  I call bullshit.  I think Netflix is big enough that they have some power.  However, I really don’t care.  I maybe the lowly consumer, but I have some power, too.  And that power is to cancel Netflix and go old school.

I am old enough to remember going to the movie rental store.  It was so exciting.  We got to walk up and down the aisles choosing which movie we wanted to see.  Then we would race right home and watch it.  Times were good and I was young without the responsibility of getting the movie back in time to avoid a late fee.  As I got older, life’s checklist got longer and time got shorter, which meant late fees got more expensive.

SoHubby and I decided we would just buy movies.  At some point, most movies make it to the $5 bin.  That, my friends, is a long wait.  Us, being part of this fast paced, I had to have it yesterday world, that didn’t work for us.  Then we heard about this great company, Netflix.  You mean they would deliver movies to our house?  There was no special return date?  There was only one low price?  Hot damn!  Sign us up.  And we had a good relationship for awhile.

Suddenly, Netflix started to see it’s stock rise (literally and figuratively) and in my opinion got too big for their britches.  However, my love affair with Netflix started to wane when we went down to the 1 movie and streaming offer.  SoHubby would go on the website and clog up our queue with crap movies.  Movies that at that moment he would have watched, but would forget about by the time they made it to our house.  Here is the journey of a Netflix delivered to the Southern household: Movie arrives in the mail.  Movie is either retrieved from mailbox that night or the next morning.  Movie would then end up in my mail pile. I would get around to my mail pile sometime that day or the next day.  I open movie, say a little curse over it, because it would most likely be a dumb shoot ‘em up movie that SoHubby ordered and place it ontop of the TV or mantel.  Days would go by.  Days turned into weeks.  Weeks turned into a month.  When all of a sudden I spied with my little eye that little red envelope.  Then another curse as I held it up for all to see asking, “How the hell long has this been sitting here.  When are you going to watch this crap, so we can send it back and get a real movie?”  So as you can see folks, Netflix is genius.  They have developed a company where  men and women pay to fight via movie queue and have a little red envelope sits ontop of the TV for a month or longer  Don’t get me started on that crap they call streaming.  Half the time the movie wouldn’t play all the way through without several stops and starts.  Oh but that is our fault, why don’t you upgrade your WiFi.  Yeah, why don’t you bite my….be nice, now.  Then there was no rhyme or reason to the streaming.  One day a top movie would be on there, the next day some D flick you would have to pay me to watch would have taken it’s place.

After the whole rate hike, I was miffed.  I was calmed down with reasons like they had to do it, poor, poor Netflix.  Okay, we can understand the plight of the business when faced with things out of their control.  The dumb move came in when they decided to divide up the streaming side and the DVD side.  Um…exsqueeze me?  Dildo say what?  You expect me to bookmark an entirely different website to put DVDs in my queue?  Oh hell, NO!  I was done, but what could I do.  I wasn’t going to do that Redbox thing.  You want me to do what with my credit card and then you will do what?  Sorry, maybe it is my age, but I am getting the feeling that technology needs to calm down for a bit.  I thought I could just go down to my local Blockbuster.  Oh, but wait!  All the Blockbusters were run out of town by the evil, yet genius Netflix.  Then a light shone over me and the angels sing.

You see I live in a village, next to a couple of small towns.  And one thing that I am constantly told about these small towns and villages is that we are a bunch of hicks that don’t move with the times.  So guess what?  There is a Blockbuster right down a very long highway, but it is there just waiting for us to choose when to get a movie and forces us to watch that damn movie that night to avoid late fees.  The best part is it seems busy, very busy, which means maybe it will stay long enough to build up it’s force, again.   Who is having the last laugh, now?  Well, not the clerk at my local Blockbuster when I told her all this.  Maybe she didn’t appreciate my fine storytelling skills.  Maybe she wasn’t interested?  Nah, that couldn’t be it.  Or maybe she just wanted to get on with her life and didn’t care why the hell I found myself at the Blockbuster with my over energized spawns.  But I felt good.  I finally got to see The Black Swan and go WTF along with everyone else.  I even promised the kids that we could go back on Friday to rent movies and maybe some Wii games.  Then they ran around like I told them Santa Clause was coming to live with us and set up shop in the backyard.  And now my life has come full circle.  We will be release from our prison of the little red envelope back to the freedom of the movie rental store and wait for our implantation of our movie chips.