Since I filled up my Netflix queue on the weekend and they only ship DVDs on weekdays, my Netflix queue said

We'll send your first available movie on Monday.

all weekend long.

Now I just looked at the queue to see if it shipped, and now it says:

Uhm, Netflix, what's going on? I've heard rumors before that you stretch out DVD shippings in order to reduce the amount of DVDs per month and customer, but do you need to do so with a new customer and his first DVD?

Then again, maybe they haven't survived their huge shipping issues from last week quite yet, in spite of my entire queue saying "Availability: Now".

It depends on your individual definition of "now", after all.

Update: Interesting, Netflix sent me an email apologizing about the bad start of my membership, extending my free trial for a week. Well then.

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When I went to Giant Eagle earlier this week, I got a two DVDs from the Redbox DVD rental machine in front of the store, as I felt like watching a movie and they only charge 1 dollar plus tax a day, which is really cheap. Sadly, one of the DVDs was so badly scratched that my drive wouldn't even read it: After a few unsuccessful tries at spinning up the disc, it spit it right back out -- though my DVD player isn't even usually that picky about what it eats (I'll spare you the reference to Americans and their fast food).

Sure enough, I called customer service (1-800-REDBOX3, in case you were wondering) and they apologized, marked the disc as "to be removed from circulation" and gave me two codes for free rentals in return.

So I took back the discs, and got two new ones -- only to notice that one of them was, yet again, looking like somebody had used it as a coaster:

Though they gave me another replacement code, I decided to try something different to satisfy my urge for movies and TV shows: I signed up for Netflix.

The idea of finding a new movie in the mail box when I come home from work sounded appealing to me. So I already put 20 discs into the queue which, considering I have the 1-DVD-at-a-time-plan, will probably take ages to go through, but we'll see how it goes. Another cool feature is their "watch instantly" collection, but I may blog about that some other time.

I wonder what my readers use to get to their movies? Let me know in the comments.

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