All My NetFlix DVD’s Are Accounted For

Photo © 2005 Andre Alforque CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Last week, I got the strangest email, and I still can’t quite figure out what to make of it.

N, from the Natural Sciences department at Bentley University, found a sealed NetFlix DVD on a cart in one of the buildings there. She also noticed the corresponding torn-off part of the envelope, the part with the subscriber’s address, in a nearby wastepaper basket. And the address (she said) was mine. So she looked me up on Google and emailed me, asking if I wanted her to drop the DVD in a mailbox.

But I don’t go to Bentley, have not been to Bentley; and that certainly isn’t my DVD.

All my DVD’s are accounted for. I am paying for all the DVD’s I got, and I got all the DVD’s NetFlix said they sent to me. And at the time N emailed me, NetFlix had confirmed that they had received all the DVD’s I sent to them. So all my NetFlix DVD’s are accounted for.

I thought that it must be a different “Tim King,” and I replied to N’s email, telling her as much. But she replied back with my postal address, which was indeed my postal address—and I’m the only “Tim King” that has ever lived at this address. She confirmed that this was the address that was on the original NetFlix envelope.

At that point, I was definitely weirded out, and I still am, because the mystery has still not been solved. All my NetFlix DVD’s are definitely accounted for, and if NetFlix had sent a DVD to my address—even one that someone else had ordered fraudulently—I would have received it here. That DVD with my address on it is definitely not one that I have ever seen, and I don’t know how it ended up on a cart at Bentley.

I thought of asking her to open it up and see what DVD it was, but then I thought better of it. There weren’t too many ways this story could play out, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to see any of them. So I just emailed her back, confirming that I have no, nada, zero missing NetFlix DVD’s and suggesting that she figure out herself what to do with it. That was the last I heard.

-TimK