Ladies and Gentlemen, in recognition of the bold, continuous failure to regroup even after the bar was dropped completely on, nay, BURIED under the soil, it is with great confusion that I award the first R?otD Triple Crown for Botched Execution, Failure to Care, and Balls-Before-Brains Marketing to the age-old champions of “Making it a Blockbuster Night.”
Really? Ruh-eeally? And, oh, REALLY?!
While I can’t seem to pinpoint your overall approach to not disappearing already, I suspect you stick to an order of operations something like:
Offer something
Do it wrong
Not care
Bring up how well things are going and, while you’re at it, offer something
We’ll use your Blockbuster-by-Mail service as the example for tonight’s ceremony.
“Oh hey, you offer video game rental through the mail for half the price of a GameFly subscription? Hey that sounds swell!”
Except you add at least a day to the mailing process by comparison to NetFlix somehow (that’s the ONLY time you’ll be afforded such a side-by-side) and yet both of you use the reg’lar old postal service.
“No matter!” I would assure myself, confident that you would deliver my latest installment of the Splinter Cell series into my hands in good time.
Wrong! You didn’t even carry this game when it was sent to me so I naturally took it as a personal attack.
I e-mailed to politely ask REALLY? and received an e-mail too clever to be from one of your programming projects yet somehow too disjointed to be one of your employees (perhaps it was your dying spirit?).
In any event, you used this medium not to apologize in any way but to remind me to keep a full queue. Although I had well over 80 titles queued up I can only assume the strategy was to send me mislabeled discs until I found something I wanted.
By this time I was content to pay about 9 bucks per month to gamble on your Grab-Bag-By-Horse service so long as you didn’t say anything further to irritate me. After all, in the end, that seems to be all business is.
That didn’t last more than a month before this act of curious courage:
Really? Where do I start? Was I not going to fly into a rage and pull up my account upon seeing this? 147 games isn’t enough in my queue to play one at a time when it takes you about four days to get one to me? Really?
In conclusion, before you go join Circuit City at the after party, let me look back fondly on testing out the Virtual Boy with you (foreshadowing?), competing in your brackets against NBA Jam players the world over, and walking in 100+ degree Tuesday heat just to see which Nintendo 64 games you’d picked up.
And now, by the power vested in me by myself and my colleagues in criticism, I do present you with this season’s R?otD Triple Crown and a big
R-R-Really?
you’re using Blockbuster and not Netflix? Really?
I use both, please and thank you. Blockbuster has video games, Netflix has streaming video, and movies by mail live in the middle of that Venn Diagram.