I've got to be more careful what I wish for. Today in my Netflix queue I did see a message "We expect to ship your next movie Wednesday" (Wednesday being tomorrow). But the process by which it appeared had the unfortunate side effect of disappearing a movie from my queue.

First I had two empty slots with the "expect to ship your next movie today" message. Then two movies appeared shipping tomorrow, as usual, except one of them merely had the vague label "Shipping." Then it disappeared and was replaced by the Wednesday message.

Update: I think this is the first time I've ever put an update in an entry. It feels so right. Some time this evening the missing movie reappeared, shipping tomorrow. My faith is restored, as a disappearing-movie bug in Netflix's software would certainly be a more serious (or at least easily soluble) problem than the shipping slowdowns.