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[Desiderato Merriwether]

"Netflix has closed the Bloomfield DVD distribution center due mainly to United States Postal Service transportation and service changes, along with increased internal production efficiencies, resulting [in] a small number of jobs lost."

When the consolidation plan was announced in 2011, there was immediate speculation about how it would affect particular mailers like Netflix. Some said that delays in sending disks back and forth would lead some customers to end their Netflix service contact. Other customers would demand that Netflix lower its prices because customers would be able to see fewer movies per month.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Network Rationalization might be pushing some customers from subscribing to streaming. The changes in delivery time could easily be driving away some portion of the $500 million a year in Netflix mail business. And they may have also contributed to the decision to close the Bloomfield distribution center.

In the Connecticut area where the Bloomfield DVD distribution plant is located, the Postal Service began consolidating the Stamford mail processing facility with a Westchester County, N.Y, facility in June (the process will be completed in September), and the Wallingford processing center will be consolidated with the Hartford facility in September.

The Postal Service and Netflix seem to have had a good relationship. The deal they made to deliver and return DVDs was apparently so good that GameFly, a company that ships DVDs like Netflix, has long complained that Netflix has been getting special treatment and illegally preferential rates.

Instead, as explained in court documents, the Commission told the Postal Service to waive the 20-cent second-ounce charge for DVDs mailed as flats and to refrain from imposing a nonmachinable surcharge on any qualifying round-trip DVD mailer that is sent as letter mail and that weighs one ounce or less.

Yesterday Netflix filed comments with the PRC about the new Round-Trip Mailer proposal. Netflix says it has "strong reservations" about the new product and asks the Commission to deny the Postal Service's request. That may be further indication that the Postal Service and USPS are having some relationship problems.

However things turn out for GameFly, the case has brought to light just how much the Postal Service is willing to do for a big customer like Netflix. The disks often jam the sorting machines so they need to be hand sorted, and it's debatable whether or not the rates Netflix is charged reflect the extra work. But $500 million a year is a lot of business, and it's no surprise the Postal Service would defend the deal and one of its best customers in the protracted argument with the PRC and GameFly.

If the Postal Service proceeds with plans to end Saturday delivery, that could cause even more problems for Netflix and companies in a similar situation. As Forbes observed earlier this year when the Postal Service announced plans to end Saturday delivery, It would "either mean Netflix will no longer be able to deliver DVDs on Saturday, or that the company would have to seek out more expensive shipping methods through UPS or FedEx. Either way, costs will be going up or revenues going down for the company, neither of which will help trader sentiment or the bottom line."

Full-scale privatization won't be happening anytime soon, but cuts in service are well underway, and more are coming. One wonders how businesses like Netflix will fare under the new postal system being shaped by Congress and the leaders of the Postal Service. How many more times will we see a company cut back its operations and then blame the Postal Service?

I should be so lucky! There are a number of people around the world who either use my email address to sign up for stuff, or who wants to steal my address (I have had my address since GMail was still by invitation only and I am not interested in relinquishing it).

I have received Airbnb reservations, hire car reservations, ailrline reservations and on and on, that the person who booked need to respond to. Ditto for pizza and other items of food ordered for delivery (and not even in the same continent, let alone the same country or city).

Recently someone registered on a number of dating sites, using my address. I receive multiple responses on a daily basis from (desperate/horny?) girls, which all go unresponded to. The poor guy must by now have a severe inferiority complex, since it would seem to him as if even on-line girls do not want to go out with him. My heart bleeds.

Anon for obvious reasons, but if I could I would have selected the Paris icon, for all the heavenly promises I keep receiving from these girls (well, I assume they are, given that all the names are (Western/English) female names, like Sarah, Linda, Lilly, et cetera). Some of them are also eye-wateringly frank and forthright about said delights that await me, all in countries and continents far away, alas...

Fat fingers? They typed it in wrong and the activation e-mail went off to the misspelled e-mail account. Which you will never see. The account owner just said "Oh bother!" and deleted it without sending a 'negative acknowledge' message back to the service (if this option even exists).

however even that is an issue as there are plenty of web designers out there that code the fields so that you have to manually enter the information again to match you it doesn't allow you to copy paste or cut and paste, and it's definitely an easy enough thing to do.

I recently came across a form that forcibly PREVENTED pasting anything. Bizarrely enough, the "I forgot my password" form was quite happy to let me paste that same email address (you know, in order to, oh, say, make sure it was really the address I actually signed up to that site with...) and let me reset the password on a rarely-used account.

Sure adding +whateverthefuk is simple enough to do but in practice if you don't remember to go into Gmail and add send as with that plus in there you might find yourself screwed when a company is telling you they can't verify you because your email address on file doesn't match what you're sending your documents from.

So make sure you do that if you're using the plus and also there are some websites that don't allow the use of plus or dash in an email extensions, yeah you're stupid and it is done deliberately because the default is to allow the dash and the plus in an email extension string but there are those who believe it's a security risk and they're even some who erroneous believe that spammers often use the dash or the plus in email names which is, of course comical and absolutely not true.

So it is effectively a one-off 2FA with the factors reversed. The novelty is in the third step, which catches misdirected emails where the recipient followed the link anyway. Because he doesn't know the corresponding username / password, he cannot unwittingly validate the account (which could be indeed a mistake or just as well, the first step of a scamming attempt).

Same here, at least 2 separate people in 2 different countries to my own. I actually managed to contact one of them to explain the situation, but trying to contact the companies themselves is like Asterix and Obelix in the house that drives you mad (from 12 tasks)

Woman in Florida using her husband's email addy that is 1 letter different from mine. 30-50 times. I called a gynocologist office in Florida to inform them that they broke HIPAA laws, and please inform their patient to get her own email addy as I was tied of receiving emails from various Cadillac dealers she was test driving at, house development realtors, etc. Clearly she's dreaming of big money while her son is still in prison and husband not long out in the free world.

Over the decades both my Demon domain names gave occasions of verbal transcription errors. When Namesco forced the recent change I pondered a long time - and tested various possible new ones on people verbally. Nice and short - and no one has managed to get it wrong yet.

As somebody (occasionally) in tech support you get to see both sides of this coin. If I need to speak to somebody, I REALLY need to speak to them to sort the problem out. I've already exhausted all the `autofix` options. Conversely, almost everyone who calls me could have solved the problem with a bit of googling or looking at the help pages or even, God forbid, a bit of elementary knowledge. It's these people that make companies hide their telephone support at the end of a very long and convoluted maze. Otherwise people wouldn't even look at all the self-help ideas, they would just pick up the phone...

The latest excuse is that COVID-19 makes it impossible to respond to support enquiries. Totally disingenuous unless the workforce is actually infected or dead, and even then there are no shortage of people available to replace them.

Early on in all the fun and games I had occasion to call Comcast tech support. While we were waiting for the set top box to reboot for the nth time, idle conversation revealed that all their tech support people were working from home as much as possible, presumably if they all had Comcast lines themselves then the company was presumably able to plumb in the corporate phone system out to individuals and let them sit at computers at home and talk to customers. So tech support, especially at this point, should be relatively easy for most companies if only they made an effort.

In South Africa just about everyone I phoned - at least in the first 5-6 months after lockdown started - was working from home. The barking dogs and wailing children in the background (sometimes foreground) kinda gave it away. We had a 3-day notice period from 26th - 29th March during which every notebook PC at every distributor I deal with was snapped up by the bigger corporates for use by their staff not deemed 'essential workers'. Some people made a l-o-o-o-o-o-t of money.

I had that about six years back and then again just recently. In the first case someone misspelled their own email address. A single character omission meant that all mail relating to their Next online account was coming to my domain. I tried to notify Next that the mail was not being delivered. And all I could get was autoreplies that they are not authorised (DPA) to talk to me about someone's personal details. They were particularly obtuse and refused to recognise that if mail is sent to my domain then it's my mail. I solved that problem in the end by configuring my mail server to auto-forward all of the mail for that account to their CEO, CFO and postmaster, adding a note to each email to tell them why they are f*cking idiots. It took a year before they did something, during which time I accumulated many demands for payment, threats of court and bailiff action etc. Presumably their poor customer never received a request for payment. They has interesting tastes in wellingtons and big knickers.

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