Stupid AOL

Ok, so I have a problem with AOL, In my life I have probably signed up 3 or 4 times, and cancelled. There is no good explanation for this, I think I will use it again and I don’t. If you are not gay, you may think I am retarded, but whatever. Gay.com sucks.

Anyway, the Customer Service people you talk to when you cancel are the worst in the world, the training they must go through to be tricky asses must be extreme. First, they say it will take about 3-4 minutes for the computer to cancel my account. I guess this is believable to many of the aol subscriber idiots, I don’t know. In these (realistically) 5 minutes the person asks you what you liked about aol, what you used, why you liked it etc. In retrospect I should have told him why I thought it would be useful, but turned out not to be due to the idiots on their service. I didn’t though, I think I settled on something like “I use it to check news” which he prompted me into saying. He then said, “Oh you mean like CNN?” “sure, whatever” Yea, I pay $23.00 to read cnn, idiot.

Anyway, he then started telling me AOL offered alternate pricing plans, no shit, I informed him I was using the BYOA plan. (which is a plan for people to just connect to the aol servers and not use aol as your isp, it’s cheaper) Then I said, “I don’t use aol as my isp.” he then said, “Oh, do you use something like internet explorer?” Now, this may deeply confuse most people, and I was shocked at first, thankfully my mom also used to confuse the same things years ago when she first ventured online, so I was prepared. I didn’t want to make him feel like that was an acceptable mistake though, so I acted like he had said something deeply confusing. He moved on.

He then started telling me about keywords, which, if you’ve never used aol, are exactly what they sound like. In olden times keywords would take you to specific points within the aol service, ie. keyword:billing. Now if there is no such keyword the client will perform a web search on the word with internal aol things on the top. Many single words will also just add .com to the end, and load in a browser. It’s not exciting, and not very new. Anyway, he was giving me examples of how he used it, and he said, (honestly) “One time I was searching for a page and I typed in ‘computers’ into a search engine, and i got millions of hits! then i tried it in keyword and it took me right to the place I wanted”. Astounded, I asked where he was hoping to go with a search for “computers”. Apparently that wasn’t scripted, and he said something confusing. About how keywords took him to the right place again.

Then, towards the end of the conversation he said he would mail me a letter explaining all these cool features he just explained, “At no additional charge” “ha, well, if you want” was my reply.

The annoying and deceptive part I really don’t like comes at the end though. “Ok, well, I extended your account for 2 more months for free, so you can see if you don’t use any of these features before you quit”. I had heard something similar last time, so I asked:

“Will it cancel automatically after that?

“Well, no, you can go to keyword:cancel and cancel after that if that’s what you decide”

“Well, I don’t really want to call you again to cancel, I’d like to cancel now”

“Oh, you don’t have to call, there are other options”

“Not the option to do it online.”

“You can either call, fax, or mail us.”

“Well, i sure don’t want to fax or mail you!”

“Well, no ISP services let you cancel online”

“Regardless, I don’t want to call again, you can either cancel it now, or it can cancel automatically after 2 months, I don’t care.”

He then broke into a very scripted termination like spiel (success!) about how I would receive a letter in the mail, and I could no longer use the service after the end of this pay cycle. Ugh.