It's been a pleasure to have been being served

[muckefuck]

I was in such a good mood tonight after dinner with monshu, Nuphy, and Blondie, that I actually decided to call customer help. Twice. The first time was to diagnosis our lost of connectivity, which suspiciously coincided with Nuphy finally cracking the Roku problem and finally making contact with the network. So whereas on the one hand you could say we're closer to a solution than we've been in two years, from another point of view we're still as far away as ever. Fortunately, all it took was restarting the router to get our Internet back.

Powered by that success, I decided to call NetFlix. As unlikely as it seems, our third replacement copy of Bodhidharma arrived today and, yes, it was cracked. Even the operator was impressed--she'd never heard of more than three discs arriving broken before. The Old Man was ready to give up, but I can't resist finding out how many more times this could possibly happen. I guess I have the mind of a scientist. Apparently, the next copy is going to be sent in a special mailer threatening bodily harm to whoever feeds it through the sorting machine at the post office.

The operator literally could not have been more pleasant to deal with. As long as I can tell it's not at my expense, I really appreciate a sense of humour in these transactions and she seemed to delight in the absurdity almost as much as I did. Afterwards, I was directed to a "short five-question survey" and I braced myself to sing her praises. But I got only one vague question--"Were you satisfied with your NetFlix experience today?"--and then it ended. I'd answered "no" because not being able to watch the movie you ordered from them is pretty much the definition of an unsatisfactory NetFlix experience.

But then it occurred to me: Maybe they meant the experience talking to the operator? I was so horrified at the prospect of slagging someone who'd just help make my night that I almost called back to see if there was some way of rectifying the misunderstanding--if, in fact, there'd been one. But, y'know, there's only so much mind-reading of an incompetent survey designer I can do, and I'd already used up my quotient on an awful and overlong media use survey earlier in the day.

Comments

[gopower.livejournal.com]

It was no doubt the same cracked disc that Netflix kept resending. A few years back, I had ordered "Clerks 2" and they kept sending me the "Clerks" animated series disc in a "Clerks 2" sleeve (or vice versa -- both were terrible when I finally saw them). After they made the same mistake a second time, even though I had promptly sent in an error report, I put a post-it on the sleeve telling them it didn't match the disc. They them emailed me bitchy auto-note telling me not to put anything else in the envelope.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If so, they've got an elaborate backstory: when I talked to the woman, she listed off all the other locations the discs had supposedly been sent from. (According to her, the longer it spends in transit the greater the chance is it will be damaged.) And the last two times, we held off on sending it back until we were notified that the replacement was already in the mail. (Nuphy suggested marking it with a pen, but I felt that was going too far.)