AOL Broad Banned

To make our move here more annoying our ‘friends’ at Qwest took my DSL connection less than serious and it took me two weeks to get connected and have a modem. With that in mind I had installed AOL 9.0 (you know, the one that is an action star in the commercials?) on my laptop to have some sort of connectivity during my wait.

This morning I called AOL and told them to cancel the account here’s a brief run down of the ‘conversation’:

Donald: Thank you for calling America Online today. How can I help you have a better online experience?

Me: Actually, I called to have you cancel my account.
[details of confirming I’m who I say I am and so he can pull up my account]

Donald: Sir did you know that AOL has [spiel read from screen about the many wonderful things AOL offers]?

Me: No, I just want to cancel my account.

Donald: Sir, I’m going to give you two more free months and you won’t be billed until August second.

Me: No, I just want to close my account, AOL has nothing I want. I’ve got a broadband connection.

Donald: Sir, did you know that AOL for Broadband can enhance your connection speed by seven times?

Me: No it can’t, please just unsubscribe me.

Donald: Sir, with the AOL for Broadband package you get enhanced [blah, blah, blah] with a special keyboard for AOL for Broadband users. [Note, I just purchased a $99.00 ergonomic wireless keyboard and mouse, I don’t want a cheap AOL keyboard]

Me: How many more steps does AOL want you to go through before I can just cancel my account because I’d like to just close the account. If there’s one more step I’m going to ask to speak to your manager.

Donald: Sir, our managers are in a meeting right now.

Me: Then I’d just ask for one of them to call me back unless you can cancel my account.j

Donald: OK sir, I’ll just need to confirm the following things…
[conversation continued in the direction I had hoped for, the account is now supposedly closed]

Why does it take so much work to get unsubscribed from their service that promises it doesn’t require a credit card (which I had to provide just to use the trial period)? Why do they behave like the freaking MOB? I hate using automated systems when I call but AOL should switch to one so I don’t have to argue with a guy who’s job is to make my life miserable. AOL, if anyone there reads this: please change your policies here so that people don’t hate you more than they already do!

I know you’ve got a business but the attitude of your employee on the phone made me so mad I’m writing about it here. Consider better business practices as a good thing… the world will thank you for it.

In Need of Yet Another Re-Design

Sorry for the poor state of this blog’s layout as I have been distracting myself with other projects for the last week (actual client work, I know, I know – who’s more important blog readers or clients?). Last night I stayed up until Midnight and imported all of the old blog’s content into this blog (It was SO easy because WordPress has an RSS file importer, and it didn’t care if my RSS was well formed, which was good because that saved me a lot of time). If you look back into the archives you’ll see that they go back quite some time. You can also comment on the old blog entries. Oh, and if you find anything that’s not quite done it may have imported some entries that weren’t quite done.

Food, Fun and Fellowship

Tonight we had the Matthew’s over and really enjoyed the time with them. Their two daughters were great fun and Abby enjoyed their company. Darby played and played with Abby and Hadley wasn’t sure what to do with such a crazy girl as our little princess. Abigail’s rambunctious and Hadley is more reserved so I think it took a while for them to get comfortable with one another.

Abby scraped her knee for the first time (to my knowledge) while playing outside, but this was OK until bedtime when she whined and whimpered as Jessica cleaned up the ‘wound’ and put a (Sponge Bob) band-aid on it.

Josiah and I had a good time chatting and then Brian White happened to be walking the dog and so he stopped in and we had fun all of us together. Jillia is having regular contractions now and so they may have a little bundle of Joy (although it is possible that it could be a bundle of Dawn as well) shortly.

Pulling Out the Big Guns

No, I’m not talking about Iraq, I’m not even talking about gangsta rap. I’m even ignoring issues like cartoon violence [which is surely the reason that I chased my brother with a hatchet as a 10 year old, it wasn’t my fault]. I’m talking about Allergy Relief. My allergies have been almost completely missing since I wen to Adam Tomasetti, an applied kenesiologist. However, Singulair does something that goes directly against the Prime Directive. It blocks Leukotrienes.

What the heck? Do you sit around cursing Latrines? I don’t. And when John and Jane Doe are at home dealing with their generic allergies are they cursing Lukeskywalker? I think not.

Merk needs a new marketing strategy.

Anti-Elvis Impersonation Next Email Front

Almost since the invention of e-mail, e-mailers have battled unwanted junk mail, or spam. Since the creation of products like Spam Assassin, which acts like a Jewish rabbi making sure your emails are kosher, spammers have faded out, but in that time period Elvis impersonating e-mailers have more than tripled. Companies like Microsoft have opened up a new division to handle the development of Anti-Elvis filters.

“We’re seeing a drastic increase in the numbers of emails people get from Elvis@Graceland.com. Users will come in to work in the morning and have 30 messages in Chinese characters with the from saying it is Elvis. One woman is in counseling in Alabama because of the devastation it caused her…. Apparently she had met Elvis in August of 1977 literally days before he died.”

Attorneys at Vegas, Hipswing and Su-yu see this as an affront to their clients in Graceland where the widowed Priscilla Presley is tired of getting emails from people claiming to be her deceased husband. They claim that if they find the ‘perp’ who did this they’ll have to ‘litigate to mitigate’, ‘sue to stop’ and warned that no-one should step on their patent leather shoes.

The author suggests that e-mail users simply just set up a filter in their email client and deal with it that way. However some experts suggest you not due this so that legitimate email from Elvis not be sent to your trash folder. A representative of the RIAA was quoted as saying:

“If Elvis is out there then we want to make contact and locate him. He may need medical attention.”

The RIAA is very concerned that Elvis be located if he is alive. They claim that he would be a strong voice against illegal file swapping.

How Not to Design a Flash Site

If you go to the following link Product promotion selector you’ll see that you need to select a country. This is good, internationalization is an issue. Then, after selecting Americas and North American English you’ll see the most confusing navigation. Mystery Meat navigation.

I was looking for the specs and found that I had to click on the phone model to get to the specs site. That’s intuitive!

Peaner Apple Abby

The above title is mostly silly, but it is the words that came out of Abby’s mouth as she asked for us to give her an applie with peanut butter on it. That is what I will be having as part of my lunch but when she heard us mention it she wanted to be part of the ‘apple action.’ And we figured out why she kept singing a song, “crazy, crazy, crazy.” It was the song Daisy (as in “Daisy, daisy give me your answer true”)! That song was on one of the VeggieTales CD’s.

Lotsa laughs with this little girl!