An AOL Nightmare

I told the AOL support tech, located somewhere in India, Pakistan, or Hell, that this would be my first post once I woke up from this nightmare. Ummm, I told him this as I was slamming down the phone. Not my usual style, but the conditions certainly warranted it.

Last Friday night, sitting in front of my old 850 mhz AMD Duron, Windows 98SE computer (insert laughter here) I decided to see what was going on with AOL these days. I had a nifty AOL for Broadband disc courtesy of the US Postal Service, and a fifty day free trial. I mean, why not?

No lightning or thunder rolled as I hit INSTALL. No smoke appeared from my processor, though considering it's age, it was due for some smoke, even a flame or two. But no. It just whirred along like it has since Mary Lynne upgraded it in her garage 3 years ago.

I restarted my geriatric, but still fully functional computer.

Then I clicked the very stylish AOL icon
And my virus software died.
And my spam software began flashing error messages.
And then IE, Mozilla and Opera wouldn't start.
After that, things began to get really bad.

I unistalled the demonic AOL,carefully using the Control Panel, and then restarted.

My virus software was still DOA

My spam software was complaining it couldn't use Port 110, and was therefore offically resigning until the idiot that caused the mess found the offending program.

Not even Opera would get me back on the Internet, though the DSL connection was working, and seemed to function fine.

That's when I called the 7 Eleven, er, AOL tech support.

After firmly establishing that I DID NOT HAVE A MEMBERSHIP, did not WANT a membership, and only wanted an exorcism for my possessed computer, he asked me what the problem was.

I told him.

Calmly. Without expletives.

And then I said the evil word.

Browser.

Yep, browser. I told him I had unistalled Beelzebub, but his spirit remained, and therefore my browsers no longer functioned.

He said, "Oh, we do not handle browsers. This is not our problem."

Even though he agreed with me that AOL had possessed my computer, he could not FIX IT!!!! Even though it was obvious the evil came from his particular region of Hell, it was not his problem.

And his supervisor was not available, and, no, the supervisor could not call me back. Apparently the phone lines run one way in India, or Pakistan, or Hell.

That's when I told him about this post.

And slammed the phone down.

Sigh.

I'm back up and running now, thanks to May at SBCYahoo tech support. Took 3 days to do it.

I'm very tired.

And could care less about a made up holiday like Kwanzaa.

Sigh.