Who Doesn’t Love Free Stuff?
Between eight and ten years ago, I received an email welcoming me to Netflix. That was a bit concerning since I hadn’t signed up, so I contacted the company. They told me someone must have accidentally used my email when they created an account. Our last names were the same and our first initial. I said, “Oh no problem, you must have additional contact information for them besides my email, could you please remove my email from the account and let them know so they can fix?”
Well, immediately that was a big problem for Netflix and well, no they couldn’t remove the email because it was the only one they had for the account, and how did they even know that it was mine? I said, “Give me your email address and start talking, I will email you the words as they come out of your mouth.” That wasn’t good enough for proof somehow.
More likely I was in the other person’s Gmail account asking to not have Netflix? Or something? What they finally ended up doing was changing the account password so that when the customer went to log back in, they wouldn’t be able to and would need to do a password reset by calling Netflix and then they would confirm the email address. Except I kept getting Netflix emails so that didn’t work.
I called again, same again—didn’t work. I changed the password several times myself because I could use the forgot password function and get an email to reset it, that didn’t work. I don’t know how they kept getting the new password without updating an email address and I didn’t really care at this point. The upshot is, for the last eight to ten years I have had Netflix on everything thing I own.
I have signed in on hotel televisions, used it on my phone, my XBOXs; my kid uses it. I only ever signed in under “Family” and told him to do the same. The entire history in “Family” is us. The other logins, “Fred,” “Softee,” and “Lylla” accumulated history. I would occasionally look because, curious. Never did a single new show appear in the “Family” watch history that wasn’t because of me.
Well, I woke up this morning to an email from Netflix telling me that this email address was no longer associated with that account and if I had any questions, etc. Thank you Softee! It has been an amazing run and I am not sure why you gave me free Netflix for the last decade but I think you are amazing!