In March this year, I lost a DVD. I am ashamed to admit that this DVD was "Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife Series 2 Disc 1". I would absolve myself by claiming it wasn't my DVD, which is true, but this disclaimer would then be rendered moot by the confession that I indeed chose to rent said DVD from LoveFilm.
LoveFilm (as you probably know) is one of many DVD rental services which sends you discs with "no late fees". You receive them, you watch them, you post them back, you pay a subscription fee every month (for me, it was £15.99). I largely enjoyed this process, even though the Post Office kept losing them, and I worried that LoveFilm were getting a little suspicious.
So when I lost a DVD myself, I decided I had to find it. I refused to blame its loss on the postal service as I had done (legitimately) so many times before. I would hunt it down, return it, and then (as writing was taking up a lot of my time) I would cancel the service. I refused to write the DVD off as lost, because there was no point paying for something I didn't want to buy, which had to be in my room somewhere. The only problem was that it wasn't.
I searched everywhere: behind my bed, under my bed, under my table, in my under-bed drawer. I lost hours of my life to that DVD. But it was to no avail: it was nowhere to be found. Every month, I thought "I've got to cancel!" Yet I kept forgetting. Finally, 9 months later and £133.84 poorer, I conceded defeat.
I marked the DVD as "lost" on my LoveFilm account, and told them I wanted to pay for it before cancelling my account.
Today, I received this reply:
"Dear Ms Sherine
We appreciate your recent email informing us that you are willing to pay for the cost of the lost title 'Perfect Housewife - Series 2 - Disc 1'. We would like to inform you that we have written off the outstanding DVD as a gesture of goodwill and the title is no longer outstanding on your account."
It was very kind of them, but I do wish I'd emailed them 9 months ago. I also wish it had been Citizen Kane instead. That would have been a lot more dignified.
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13 comments:
A particular irony here is that had you followed the advice of Ms Turner and been more like a perfect housewife, you probably would have had a designated place in which to keep the DVD, and therefore wouldn't have lost it.
It's probably the first time LoveFilm has ever had someone admit to losing one. No wonder they were magnanimous(and doing that has sort of vindicated you on all the ones that went missing in the post).
What's wrong with that DVD? It's my all-time favorite.
If it had been Citizen Kane you wouldn't have minded paying for it.
*Snigger*
Anthea Turner? Perfect housewife? Pah! I am the perfect housewife!
Would it not have been cheaper to by Anthea Turner, get her to rerecord the DVD and send that off to LoveFilm?
Fantastic to see you back here in blogsphere, it put a smile on my face.
I can't decide which is more shocking - the fact that you consciously chose to rent this DVD, the fact that the show exists at all or the fact that it made it to a second series.
Perfect Housewife? It sounds like a Victorian pocket book...
Heh. That's your Indian side showing Ariane.
The more important question is, did you learn anything??? (I keed! I keed!)
Anonymous: That is indeed ironic! Though I omitted to mention that the disc slipped out of the envelope as I opened it, never to be seen again. Even Ms Turner herself couldn't have prevented this turn of events.
Tobias: Thank you. I did wonder whether they wrote them all off. Perhaps they realised that it was pointless buying another copy as no one else would want to rent it...
Duohedron: Very true. And nothing's wrong with that DVD (at least, I don't know if anything's wrong with it, because I never got to watch it...)
Kia: I think you'd love it.
Phil: Really? Did you steal it?
Josh: Aww. And quite possibly.
Graham: Decisions, decisions... I thought it sounded like a Stepford Wife manual.
Sunny: I did! I learnt lots of things. Like: don't search for a DVD for nine months when you could be having a baby in that time instead.
Ms Sherine, didn't you write an article earlier this year about being unclean?
OK, am a bit of an ignoramus, I don't know who is Anthea. Still, this is funny.
Slurper: Yes, I did. That's why I needed Anthea, to encourage me to be cleaner.
Muhamad: Don't worry, a lot of people don't. She's an ex-Blue Peter television presenter. And thank you.
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Joannah
http://transcendmemory.net
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