The Chatterbox

AOL is *Weird*

Okay, so all of we old-timers who have been online forever know that AOL is weird, but today they've hit a new high on my weird-ness scale. A little history just for fun.

I was originally a member of AOL before AOL even was AOL. Do what? How is that even possible? I hear you say.

Well, see I was a geek back in the 80's too and was actually one of the first members of Q-Link back in November, 1985 because I wanted to get online with my state-of-the-art Commidore C-64 "computer" that had no hard drive and two huge floppy drives. Dialing in long distance at a whopping 2400 kbps, which was screamingly fast in those day. Hey, it was twice as fast as 1200 kbps and much faster than I started out with on my state-of-the-art machine!

Q-Link was one of the original online services (tongue in cheek calling it an online service, but it was one if the biggest and best back in the day... It was actually just a BBS for those who remember what they were) out there in the US. I think I paid something like 10 bucks per month, plus 6 cents per minute I was connected. Not including the long distance dial in number I had to connect to of course.

Eventually Q-Link was one of the services that were snapped up, merged or what have you into a service called America Online, which had this grandiose vision of making the online experience everyone in the US could take part in. Sounds funny today, but back then it wasn't. Somewhere around here I still have some old AOL installation disks to prove that I was there in the beginning. I seem to recall that I have one of the pre-version 1 DOS floppies and the very first Windows version they ever released. I'm really dating myself now aren't I? LOL

I remember the days when my AOL bill to be online used to run in the $1,000 range each month. No, that's not a typo, that's what it used to cost if you were online much. Eventually I became Remote Staff for AOL just to get the free connection perk that all staff got. I got talked into it by a friend of mine. First I was a host in the brand new MTV area of AOL. Eventually I became a Guide also. And a Guide Trainer. For the US first, then also for the UK when their service came online and Canada. It was kind of fun, but I eventually retired from all of it and closed down my AOL account.

There's a quick look at the history.

So anyway, back to the present day.

Several years ago (we're talking 2000 or there abouts) I signed up for an AOL account again because I was going out of town and needed to make sure I had Internet Access. Can you believe that even 5-6 years ago you couldn't get an Internet connection at most hotels? You couldn't unless you had your own ISP, and even then you had to pay whatever phone fees the hotel charged. There was no such thing as WiFi from your room or anywhere else in the hotel.

So I signed up for this AOL account and used it I think 3 or 4 times over the course of a couple of years when I was travelling. No biggie, I just left the account open for their $20 or whatever per month so that I didn't have to sign up, cancel and sign up again each time I was going out of town. I literally didn't use the account at all. Maybe a total of 30 hours over the course of all those years.

So a week or so ago I decide that it's finally time to cancel this account that I never use anymore. I was hoping to be able to do it online, so I installed AOL's software on my computer so that I could log in and cancel it. Yes, you read that right. I didn't even have AOL's software installed on my computer, which should point out how much I used it even though I was paying for it.

Of course you can't cancel online. You have to call in.

So I call the toll free number to cancel the service. Not surprisingly, the address they had on file for me (being several years old) was wrong. It was the place I lived at back around 2000. So I have the guy I spoke with named Sean update the address information because he tells me they'll send out a confirmation letter.

Of course he only tells me this after 20 minutes of trying to keep me with AOL because they have this fantastic Security that no other ISP can offer [cough, cough] and then trying to give me a free month with the stipulation that I need to call back in to cancel or they'll start billing me again in February.

That's weird maybe, considering I obviously hadn't used the service in well over a year since it wasn't even installed on my computer. But that's not the weird part.

(I'm sure after all of this you're waiting for the punchline, right?)

Well, the weird part was that even after correcting the mailing address to my current one --giving it to him twice because he didn't get it the first time and having him read it back to me-- and spending a good 30 minutes on the phone making sure that the account was actually going to be cancelled, they decided to send the cancellation confirmation to ... (wait for it)

My mom's address!

Now I have no earthly clue how they could have gotten that confused. I've never lived at that address and have absolutely no connection with it other than the fact that my mom lives there. In fact, she wasn't even at this address until a couple of years ago, having purchased the house and moved in during 2003.

I'd have never known it except for the fact that we took mom out for dinner tonight and she brought the mail along thinking it might be important. How in the world AOL happened to get the address of my mom, or got lucky enough to hit upon the address of someone related to me, is a mystery.

So I'm just going to chalk it up to AOL being weird...