Common Sense 1, Netflix 0

Oops, I wrote this about two weeks ago and apparently forgot to publish it. I only discovered it now because I was poking around after upgrading my version of WordPress. Well, it may be old news now, but it’s already in the can so I guess I’ll publish it now.

The Wife and I have been subscribers to Netflix for about a year now. Some months we just let the discs sit there on top of the television and other months we’ll go through two or three discs a week. Overall, it’s been a pretty good deal – especially when you factor in not having to drag the kiddos to the video store.

So we were pretty dismayed when we received a tersely worded e-mail saying that Netflix’s “Profiles” feature was being eliminated. And being eliminated for seemingly no good reason whatsoever.

Profiles allow customers to set up multiple queues for rentals under the same account. So even though The Wife and I have completely different tastes in movies and television, we can still share a single 2-disc-at-a-time rental account. Basically we’re guaranteed to have one of her rentals and one of my rentals at home all the time.

But apparently this nifty feature was just too much for the folks at Netflix to handle. So they decided to phase it out to “make the website better for all customers”. Brilliant. Outstanding. Nothing like a company actually coming out and saying that they’re decreasing the level of service they’re providing and giving you no good reason whatsoever.

I highly enjoyed their suggestion that we consolidate all of our various queues into the main profile queue before the deadline, but provided no mechanism for doing so. You would just have to manually re-add all of your movies from different profiles into the main queue yourself. A simple “consolidate all of my profiles” feature would have been mighty useful.

Fortunately, the Internet quickly exploded with angry rage and Netflix had to sheepishly back-track, saying that Profiles won’t be going anywhere. At least they quickly realized what a bonehead move they had made and rectified the situation.

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• Birds have started hanging out on the tiny ledge outside my office window. Now when I look out the window, sometimes a feathered guest is looking back at me.
• The Dog has finally decided that The Girl poses no imminent threat and is starting to discover that babies provide a whole realm of smells to investigate.
• I don’t want to jinx anything, but I must point out that at the all-star break I’m still kicking everyone else’s bums in my fantasy baseball league.
• Seen on a local TV station’s web site: fun with homonyms
• Seen in a local advertorial publication: fun with typos
• See on our local paper’s web site: fun with automated news searches