Given the number of movies that I watch, my parents decided to give me a three month subscription to Netflix for Christmas this year. The way it works is, for a monthly fee of $18 or so, Netflix sends me 3 movies that I can keep as long as I want. When I’m finished with one of them, I drop it into a postage paid envelope, and they send me another.

Like all great gifts, this was something I would’ve never bought for myself. I thought that I might not be able to stand the lag time between mailing an old movie out and getting a new movie back. When I want to watch a movie, as an American, I want said consumable in my hand within 5 minutes no matter what the time of day or night. And preferably said consumable should come with something free like, say, a 64 oz. Big Gulp. And maybe a cookie. So, when I thought about requesting a movie on a web site and having to wait at least 3 days for it to arrive, I figured that signing up would make my life more complicated rather than easier.

This is without even mentioning that I have, over the years, developed a finely honed system to avoid all inbound communication to my residence. My answering machine is in French, which I don’t speak, and full of messages that I rarely pick up. E-mail is worse is a notch down from there, and snail mail, god help it, is at the bottom of the proverbial dung heap.

Why? My mailbox sucks. It’s always crammed with crumpled piles of bills, ads for the price of produce at the local grocery stores, and prize notifications for “exciting” trips to visit “fabulous” time share opportunities from contests I never entered. Not to mention the fact that it’s completely incapable of speaking French half as well as the answering machine. It’s a mute, trixy little mailbox. And trixy little mailboxes get less attention per week than I dedicate to learning enough French to understand my snotty French answering machine: zeero hau-airs. hawhawhaw.

So, I figured that joining Netflix would not only upset the delicate balance of power in the relationship between my mailbox and I, but would also increase my anxiety because of lack of said movie being in my aforementioned hand within my 5 minute American time limit of desiring it. But, despite all the issues it brings to the table, it doesn’t take a mathematical wizard to figure out that it would be much cheaper for me to rent movies from Netflix than BlockBuster. Right?

I’m not so sure. Normally, I can wander through a Blockbuster for a good 25 minutes without finding a single movie that I want to watch, leaving me with an extra $4.95 in cash and 1.5 hours free at the end of the night. If I signed up for Netflix, I thought, the monthly $18 fee makes it seem like any movie after the fourth is a freebie (when compared to the $5/rental blockbuster), encouraging me to put my ass on the couch and waste time on movies that I normally wouldn’t even watch. Trixy Netflix.

Ah, how astute I am.

In the last two weeks, since activating my Netflix account, I’ve spent a relatively insane amount of time not only on the Netflix site rating movies and putting them in my queue, but the queue consists almost entirely of movies that I have either passed over in the video store or never even heard of. And when I am not on the site checking what’s been returned and what’s been sent, I’m running to the mailbox and literally sweeping my hand around in there feeling for Netflix envelopes. The balance of power has been upset, and I’ve sadly become the mailbox’s little French bitch.

Even though it wastes a lot more of my time, drives me crazy, and they’ve sent me the wrong discs twice within two orders, I am under the distinct impression that this was one of the best gifts I got this year. Oops. Gotta run. The mailbox has no idea I’m using the computer.

Posted in Movies