Netflix and Ill Will

About a month ago or so, I tried to watch a show on Netflix. The Netflix I pay for. It told me I couldn’t watch anything because too many other people who don’t pay for my Netflix were busy using it.

I didn’t like that answer, so I went through the annoying process of changing the password to kick everyone else out. If my sons in college want to watch Netflix, they can pirate it from some teenage “free” TV app like all their friends do, dammit.

Everything was back to normal after the password change until two days ago when I got a series of emails from Netflix.

Now, I get “A new device is using your account” emails from my streaming apps all the time, usually when one of the boys or my wife watches something on their phone. I’ve become accustomed to ignoring them, because they never give any useful information. It’s always “Device: Smartphone. Location: North or South America.”

I got a few of those usual “new device” emails and then some new ones. “Thanks for adding an Extra Member account” was the subject of one, and “The $7.99/month Extra Member fee has been added to your bill” was the subject of another.

Normally, I would immediately discount those as spam, but they looked legitimate enough that I investigated further. Sure enough, they were coming from the real Netflix. Hmm… I don’t think I like this…

When I logged into Netflix from my computer – something I never do because I am 52 years old and only watch TV on TV’s – I discovered that, lo and behold, some jackass had logged into my account and made themselves at home.

I have always tried to keep my TV streaming passwords simple and all the same, because I will inevitably have to “type” them into the screen using the remote arrow keys and the enter button, which, as you know, is almost as annoying as a popcorn kernel fragment stuck between your teeth, or trying to fish something small out of your garbage disposal. I guess my universal streaming password was a little too unsophisticated, because some total rando apparently figured it out.

I didn’t even bother asking one of the boys if they did it, because they aren’t that dumb. They know we have taxes, fees, and penalties around here for unauthorized stupidity. I’ve been preparing them for having to answer to the IRS since they were old enough to know what money is.

It would be one thing if this guy had simply hacked the account and watched Netflix on one of the existing profiles. That probably would have gone undetected. Sure, the show recommendations and “already watched” would have gotten squirrely, but we probably would have shrugged it off and assumed Netflix was out of whack, or accused my mother-in-law of using the wrong profile.

But no, this winner made himself his own profile named “FAUSTO,” complete with a stupid-looking Anime-ish face, and then proceeded to purchase an Extra Member pass, just for himself. I guess he also got tired of getting kicked out of my Netflix and fixed the problem in his own way.

I’m honestly not sure whether to face palm or tip my cap to his gutsy move.

Either way, the Netflix password has been beefed up, along with all the other streaming passwords, just in case Fausto likes Hulu or Paramount Plus as much as Netflix. There’s an afternoon of my life I won’t get back.

And seriously, Fausto, my Netflix subscription is like twelve bucks a month. If you can’t afford that, you shouldn’t be watching TV in the first place. Get off your ass and get a job!

As for me, I’m just giddy with anticipation about getting to “type” the new longer and more complicated password with the handy remote control arrow button system for every streaming service on every TV.

I think I’m actually starting to miss paying for cable…

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

Your new favorite humor columnist is on Facebook Just a Smidge

Flu Game Shame

I just finished watching “The Last Dance” on Netflix. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it’s the story of Michael Jordan’s career and the intertwined story of the Chicago Bulls’ twin three-peats. I must say, it doesn’t matter if you’re a sports fan or not – it is riveting television.

Along with Tiger King, it comes with my highest Netflix recommendation.

I remember the three-peats, but I was unaware of a very important fact that came to my attention in episode nine of the documentary – a fact that brings utter shame on the entire state of Utah.

It happened before the fifth game of the 1997 NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz. The game was in Utah and the series was tied 2-2, and in a best-of-seven series, game five is huge.

Game five went down in the history books as “The Flu Game,” because Jordan was sick as a dog the night before, in bed all day before the game getting fluids through an IV, and looked like the walking dead when he went out onto the court.

I remember the flu game, but I did not know the real story. The story that casts a shadow of ignominy (Greek for “you suck”) over the entire beehive state.

Jordan and the Bulls were staying at the Marriott in Park City. It was 10:00 the night before game five. Jordan was in his hotel room hanging out with his bodyguards and his personal trainer. He was hungry and they were trying to find him some food.

The hotel’s room service was already closed, and no restaurants were open except for one pizza place that finally answered the phone. Jordan’s trainer ordered the pizza and a little while later five guys showed up to deliver it, all trying to get a peek inside the room.

The trainer paid for the pizza at the door and brought it into the room, but didn’t have a good feeling about the whole situation. When was the last time five pizza delivery guys brought you your large thin-crust peperoni? That is a full four more pizza guys than the industry standard single pizza guy.

Jordan’s trainer told the room about the group delivery and expressed his concerns, warning against touching the pizza for fear of foul play. It was obvious the pizza guys knew the food was going to the Bulls, and maybe they even knew it was going to Jordan himself. Michael was hungry enough that he said screw it and ate the whole pizza himself.

Four hours later, Jordan was hurling his guts out in the hotel bathroom.

Flu my ass.

But let’s just forget about the pizza for a minute. Here’s the thing, Utah – Jordan scored 38 points that night and even had the clutch three-pointer with 30 seconds left in the game to put it away. He beat you guys with the “flu.” That was impressive enough at the time when we all thought it was the actual flu, and served to show that you guys, as a basketball team, never really had a chance.

Now, not being able to beat the Bulls in the ‘90s is nothing to be ashamed of as a basketball team, but let’s face it – if you can’t even do it when Jordan is near death, that should tell you something.

Now let’s get back to the pizza and the tarnish of shame it brings upon your entire ridiculously straight-bordered state.

First Pizza Scenario: Assuming the pizza was purposely tainted in an attempt to disable one or more of the Bulls players, that means you had residents of Utah who had zero confidence in your ability to win a championship on your own. Nice fan base, losers. Shame on you.

Second Pizza Scenario: Assuming the food poisoning was accidental and the pizza was not purposely tainted, that means you have a state that can’t even make a pizza right. The city of Chicago beats the entire state of Utah in basketball and pizza. Shame on you.

Overriding Utah Food Scenario: You suck at food service in general. You have a state with major hotels that shut down room service before 10:00. Seriously? And your restaurants can’t muster the strength to stay open much past sunset either, huh? What a fun place to visit! Congratulations on being the lamest state anyone has ever heard of. Shame, shame, big, fat food service shame on you. Gordon Ramsay will be flying in soon to yell at you. Try not to faint from all the strong language.

I’m not even mad about the Jordan pizza thing. You got what you deserved with that one. I’m mad that if I visit your pretend state, apparently I won’t be able to get a cheeseburger at 11:00 at night.

Get it together, Utah. That is just sad.

And shameful.

See you soon (not you, Utah),

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

 

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Exotic Homeschooling with Joe

These are incredible times. These are trying times. These are awesome times.

We are in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide shutdown of our everyday lives, and when the schools closed, we parents were called upon to become homeschool teachers. None of us can lie and say that has gone well, but we’re re-learning math and generally giving it our best shot, on the days we’re not hiding from the children and day-drinking in the garage.

Thankfully, however, in these trying times, either fate or incredibly awesome timing by Netflix executives has ensured that our children are not the only ones getting an online education during the quarantine.

When the homeschool day is done, and the kids have gone to bed, us parents have been blessed with exactly what we needed: the ability to instantly feel great about the direction our lives are going. We have been given the amazing opportunity to learn about the human dumpster fire that is the world of private American big cat owners, the men who love them, the sister-wives who may or may not be able to leave them any time they want, and their totally murdered-and-fed-to-a-600-pound-feline dead husbands.

We have been given Tiger King.

It is unclear how our amazing teachers are going to assess and grade our children’s homeschool progress and learning, but I can assure you, if our children can soak up their school work with as much zeal as the world has devoured the first season of Tiger King, every single one of them will have straight A’s.

So, in the spirit of our continued online education, here are twenty things I have learned from Tiger King:

1) Don’t do meth.

2) There are more privately-owned tigers in America than there are tigers out in the wild. On the one hand, that’s sad. On the other hand, U.S.A, U.S.A, U.S.A.!

3) Seriously, don’t do meth.

4) Don’t snort or smoke meth, and also don’t ever marry Carole Baskin. She’ll straight up kill you.

5) It is possible to be a gay man and also have a peroxide-highlighted mullet and own multiple fringy leather jackets. I was under the impression all gay men were fashion conscious, but then again, I have never been to Nowhere, Oklahoma.

6) Hiring a cross-country hitman is relatively cheap in Oklahoma, as long as they are also provided with a lot of cocaine, and you don’t mind if they actually do the job or not.

7) Zoo-based sex cults are a real thing, at least in the Carolinas.

8) You can be a cocaine drug lord, go to prison for murdering a DEA informant and being party to cutting said informant up into little pieces with a circular saw, get out of jail only twelve years later, somehow still own your own private “zoo” in Miami with all sorts of big cats like tigers and leopards, and be one of the most well-adjusted people in the cast of characters on Tiger King.

9) Sometimes, a really quality documentary requires two directors. A second one to actually direct the documentary, and a first one to live on the zoo and shoot years-worth of film, never backup any of the footage offsite, and then loose it all in an arson fire that also kills a bunch of alligators.

10) Every person who owns large cats is bat-shit crazy.

11) Every person who owns large cats has killed someone, enslaved someone, and/or done a ton of drugs. Usually all three.

12) Sometimes it takes a while to understand that working at an illegal tiger zoo operation owned by an intensely egomaniacal man with a frosted mullet and a sidearm might not be the right career choice for you. Sometimes that realization comes long after a tiger bites your arm off. Also, don’t do meth.

13) Wearing a bandana under a flat-brimmed Oakley baseball cap makes you look like a complete tool, even before you open your mouth to prove that you are, in fact, a complete tool. (I already knew that one, but this show majorly reinforced it.)

14) Meth can not only destroy everything you and your dentist worked so hard to protect, but it can also apparently cause you to make very questionable decisions in the bedroom.

15) Carole Baskin totally did it.

16) Gay, redneck, tiger-owning, mulleted, polygamist country singers will, in fact, sell you pizza topped with expired Walmart meat they got for free, just to keep costs down at the park.

17) Ligers are actually a real thing, and not just Napoleon Dynamite’s favorite made-up animal.

18) It is possible to have a worse haircut than Joe Exotic, if you happen to be a redheaded, jet ski-riding, lemur-having snitch boy.

19) Anyone you know personally whom you think is weird, is not weird by a mile compared to big cat owners.

20) Carole Baskin’s current husband should be a lot more worried than he probably already is.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Streaming Moo-vies

Our security was breached earlier this week, and we immediately went on high alert. Things were tense on Monday when I received the warning email, alerting me to suspicious activity on my account.

From: Netflix

Subject: New sign-in to your account

New sign-in to Netflix

Hi Marc,

We noticed a new sign-in with your Netflix account.

Device: Computer

Location: United States

Time: August 6th, 5:17 PM PDT

If you signed-in recently, relax and enjoy watching! But if you don’t recognize this sign-in, we recommend that you change your password immediately to secure your account.

We're here to help if you need it. Visit the Help Center for more info or contact us.

–Your friends at Netflix

Wow, Netflix, thanks for the heads up! A device inside the borders of America logged onto my account. Hmm… I’m currently in America, but there are at least a few other people here as well, so I really don’t know what to think.

I mean, if you had said Location: Myanmar (Formerly Burma, name changed in 1989), I would have known immediately that the activity was unauthorized, and I would have learned a fun fact about a Southeast Asian country. But sadly, that wasn’t the case.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but the United States is divided up into fifty or so states, united together for a common goal: twenty-four hour access to reasonably-priced fast food. Each of these states has a border, so we can keep them all separate. Rarely do those borders move, so as long as you’re sitting still, it’s fairly simply to figure out which state you’re in.

But you didn’t tell me Location: Louisiana (Formerly Burma, name changed in 1812). If you had, I would have known right away that something was amiss, since I’m in California.

And again, I’m not sure how up on geography you are, but most states here in the U.S. are divided into counties, and further delineated by cities, towns, villages, hamlets, parishes, townships, Nike corporate campuses, etc.

But you didn’t tell me Location: Los Angeles (Formerly Mexico, name changed in 1848). If you had, I would have immediately accused my sister of stealing my account, since I’m in Rocklin and she has a history of shady behavior.

But I already knew it wasn’t her. The new sign-in to the account was my son, getting his new school Chromebook loaded up with all the important academic apps like Netflix and Candy Crush, and he was sitting three feet away from me.

Come on, Netflix, you can do better than this. Every single TV, computer, tablet, and phone in our home connects to Netflix from the same Wi-Fi router. You literally could have told me Location: Your living room (Formerly The Allen’s living room, name changed in 2008). How hard could that actually be?

I don’t know anything about computers, but I do know the story of a cow. Many years ago, before the internet (so you guys at Netflix weren’t around yet, but pay attention to this story anyway), mad cow disease broke out in North America. Scientific investigators were able to track the original source of the disease back to a single cow in a specific stall on a Canadian farm. If tracking a disease back to a stall number in a barn was possible without the internet, please tell me how you can only pinpoint a new log-in to my account down to a 3.8 million square mile area?

Maybe you guys should assign each Netflix account a cow…

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

I Love Meth

It’s time I came clean. I can’t hide it anymore.

I love crystal meth. I can’t stop. I have to have it all the time.

Not the actual drug. What am I, an idiot? Don’t answer that.

No, I’m talking about the show about the drug; Breaking Bad. It’s soooo good. It’s the best thing I’ve put into my eyes since Pulp Fiction came out.

I was addicted from the first scene. The pilot episode begins with a middle-aged man wearing only beige socks, tan Hush Puppies, tighty whities, and a full-face gas mask, behind the wheel of an antique Winnebago, driving frantically at seventy miles an hour down a desert road, with an unconscious passenger riding shotgun in a gas mask, and two dead gang bangers and a destroyed chemistry set sliding around on the linoleum floor in the back.

You had me at hello. I will take whatever else you have to offer, please.

I know we’re about eight years late to the party, but we don’t have whatever channel it was on, and we’re too cheap to pay for Netflix, and we were busy raising kids and working and stuff, so we had to bide our time and wait to make friends with someone who owned it on DVD.

We finally found our DVD dealer, and now we’re binge-watching the chronicles of Walter White, high school chemistry teacher gone bad.

Through a rare perfect storm of writing, casting, acting, and directing, the geniuses behind Breaking Bad have made a show about meth more addicting than actual meth. My wife and I have watched thirteen episodes in two nights.

We are TV tweakers. Just like meth heads, our dietary habits and personal hygiene have gone out the window. Sleep? Showers? Dinner? Who cares? All we care about is the next episode. You’ve heard of meth mouth? I have meth butt. I am creating a divot in our new couch, and my back is starting to hurt, but I don’t care.

The only thing we care about is the next episode.

That became more obvious last night when my wife foolishly had a girls’ night out instead of watching the hijinks of Walter White with me. We were both a wreck. She couldn’t concentrate on the conversation, because all she could think about was getting back to the couch at home. I did nothing but pace back and forth in front of the television, waiting for her to get home and nervously itching my meth butt, craving my fix.

We won’t make that mistake again. We don’t need less Breaking Bad in our lives. We need more. From now on, we will always stay home. We need more Walter White. We need more Jesse Pinkman. We need more Skinny Pete. We need more of it all.

Is six o’clock in the evening a good bed time for the kids during the summer? It is if you’re trying to get to season three as fast as you can.

You guys didn’t get dinner? Um... here’s a bag of Cheetos. Eat them in your room. G’night. Yes, I know it’s still daytime outside. Go to sleep.

Why are you kids awake at five A.M.? Go away. Your mom and I were up until two this morning watching our shows. You’re hungry? Go see if the neighbors are having breakfast. You can eat over there. We need to sleep for another five or six hours.

We have to rest up. We’ve got a long night of meth ahead of us.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2015 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!