Like just about everyone else in the world, Wendy and I both cut our internet teeth with America Online. We no longer use it, but there have been a couple of times over the years when "exciting new features" promised in the latest version have lured us back to try it out again. We've always figured out pretty quickly that the "exciting new features" were really the same old crap packaged differently… or else they were AOL's versions of services that could be obtained in a better form elsewhere. So we were lured back a couple of times and we ended up canceling our membership shortly thereafter both times.

The thing I remember most was that canceling an AOL membership was like pulling teeth. The sales reps that I spoke with were extremely pushy and determined to talk me out of canceling. They'd beg, bargain, argue… they'd do everything except provide me with actual customer service. Since I was an AOL customer and since I wanted my account canceled, it's my opinion that acceptable customer service would have been to simply cancel my account without hassling me about it.

The last time we canceled an AOL account, the telephone interaction with the service rep went so badly that I ended up actually yelling "JUST CANCEL THE DAMN ACCOUNT!" about three times before the guy finally agreed to do what I wanted. I'm not proud of that, I shouldn't have yelled, I shouldn't have sworn. I do believe, though, that if I hadn't sunk to that level, I'd have been on the phone with him for probably ten more minutes.

Apparently, I'm not the only person who's had this kind of trouble with AOL.

If you haven't seen Vincent Ferrari tell his AOL horror story on the news, check out the YouTube clip below:

Check out Vincent's blog, Insignificant Thoughts, where you can read his post about the incident with AOL. You can also click here to here the entire, unedited tape of the phone call with the AOL rep.

Hopefully, this will have a snowball effect and maybe… just maybe… lead to some positive changes at AOL. They're share of the ISP pie is smaller and smaller every day. They need to give people reasons to want their services instead of reasons to believe that signing up with AOL is like making a deal with the devil.