October, 2005:

Have you seen Soylent Green yet? 1973. Charlton Heston. Women are furniture. Sort of a Mad Max meets I Sing The Body Electric. Anyway, my friend and I are an hour and twenty minutes into this, one of my final rentals from Blockbuster Online. I’ve cancelled my membership and I have two movies left to view and return. We’ve got seventeen minutes left to go. Charlton Heston is running through a Mad Human Disease factory, a shot and bloodied leg that produced a limp in previous scenes does not stop him from traversing catwalks and laddders while evading bad guys in these scenes. He’s on the verge of discovering one of mankind’s ugliest inventions, proof required to save the world from the evil Soylent Corporation. Alarms blare while dead-body dump trucks squeal around town in search of the Man Who Will Expose Their Dirty Deeds, thanks to a last minute death bed confession from Edward G Robinson in his 101st and final movie appearance, when all of a sudden - POOF!!!!

If I were paranoid, I could blame Blockbuster for this, as I am clearly cursed. (I have yet to mention that of the two movies that I rented with the TWO FREE IN-STORE COUPONS, one stopped playing after 44 minutes on my computer - just reverted to permanent pause - and the other arrived from Netflix the next day.) Between Blockbuster and Netflix…if the answer were a snake, it would have bitten me. Many times. And I would have died a slow torturous death. And then the Soylent Corporation would have picked me up and chopped me up into tiny flat green squares.

Well apparently, me & Tommy Lee could hang out on a long road trip with only one CD player in the car. If you wanna take a quiz to see who shares your taste in music click on the link below

Tommy Lee Shares Your Taste in Music

See his whole playlist here (iTunes required)

One of these days I shall shut up about Blockbuster, but my FREE online membership has not yet ended.

Last Thursday I received an email from them telling me that my next movie was on its way. Today (4 days later) I get a clear plastic bag from the United States Postal Service containing what remained of the envelope that once contained said next movie. My initial thoughts were “F(*&K!, I’m trying to get a FREE month here and now I’m gonna have to buy a lost movie! And somehow this is going to get all tied up in the canceling of my membership (which must occur very soon as my FREE month ends this week) and while trying to resolve this issue, I will end up paying for a 2nd month.”
So $24.99 for the movie and $17.99 for the 2nd month equals $42.98 for 1 free month of movies, which would be about what it would cost to go into the damn store and rent them in person.

Well, oddly enough Blockbuster is very forgiving when this occurs and with a couple of clicks, they are allegedly going to send it to me again at no charge. However, if I make a habit of it, they say, they will be forced to cancel my membership.

Which I may be forced to do if they decide to charge me for a 2nd month after I’ve tried to cancel it on my own.

After pressing some button on Blockbuster’s website to “expedite” my DVD turnaround from 13 days to something reasonable (because apparently, they won’t serve you unless you Please Ring The Bell), they send me another DVD so that I have THREE out at a time as per their agreement. Idiots. But the reason they have made it onto the scoreboard is because I mailed back 2 DVDs on Monday and they claimed to receive them on Tuesday. Of course they are back to the TWO out at a time policy, but the mere fact that they admit receiving their mail when they actually receive it garnered a few crumbs.

And I have allegedly broken 1000 hits on my Nanny Goats blog, so points for me too!

So one day after I sent my little note to Blockbuster (see yesterday’s post), I get the following response:

Dear Margaret,

I’m not sure what they are trying to tell me, unless they actually expect me to believe it took 11 days for them to receive the DVD. Let’s see… It’s going from Los Angeles to a city about 30 miles away (Arcadia), so…yeah….that would be Hurricane Katrina’s fault.

Anyway about 11 minutes after that, I get another email from them:

Re: Slow DVD turnaround
Reference Number: 000013-009410
Hello: Margaret

The survey asked me 5 questions all of which wanted to know how the employee who handled my inquiry performed.

{SIGH!!!!}