AO-Hell

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave..”

Brad’s having issues trying to get an AOL account canceled. I’m not surprised. (He’s also having issues with the credit card company, but that’s another story..) Let me share a little secret with you. Way back in the day, before I got interested in IT as a career, I did some accounting stuff for the chargeback department of a rather large bank’s credit card processing division. I came to some conclusions during my time there, one of which was that AOL was a crappy company. (This was even before I knew what their crappy software did!) You would be amazed at the number of chargebacks we had to do for AOL subscribers who had told AOL to cancel their accounts, been told that they were closed, and still got billed for them the next month. (There were enough of them that in the pages and pages of reports on chargebacks I would get every day, they stand out in my memory.)

Now, keep in mind that AOL get’s charged a processing fee every time this sort of screw up happens, so you would have thought that somewhere in the last 7-8 years they would have gotten that fixed, but I’m guessing they haven’t.

Oh, by the way, one other company who stood out was Netcom, I’m hoping AOL disappears like Netcom someday….

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