Corner Bar, Netflix Queue

The July burglars waltzed off with our television. We have scant time to watch it anyway, and thus far we haven’t bothered to replace it.

I took advantage of the excuse to cut out DVDs delivery from Netflix, saving some $16/month. About a million people have done something similar, it seems. This is a drop on the Netflix ocean, but I expect one problem here is that customers like me – marginal users who don’t watch a lot of DVDs – are Netflix’s most profitable cohort.

The big loss for me was unexpected. It’s not that I miss the movies: I miss the Netflix queue. There’s no particular reason for Netflix to keep a DVD queue for someone who isn’t a DVD subscriber, but for several years I’ve used the Netflix queue to plan the next hundred movies I planned to watch. I should have exported that queue before I cancelled. Now, with Netflix spinning off the DVD business as Qwickster, I guess that queue may be gone for good.

I don’t watch that much football, but I do like to see a game sometimes. Yesterday, I walked down to the local bar to catch Patriots-Chargers. The place was busy, though I bet a lot of these folks have televisions of their own. Lots of happy Patriots fans of course.

I chatted with one fellow, a short guy in his sixties, while he waited for the bartender to pull three pints of Pabst. Gathering them up and heading back to his table, he nodded to me and actually said, in broad Boston: “See you later, pal.” It’s like the first time you meet an Australian who actually says, “G’day mate!”