AOHell

About a year ago, we finally got rid of AOL. Juri loved the program, and had it for a long time, despite my hatred of it. When it came time for removal of the program, I went through an hour long discussion with the customer service guy in order to finally get the account cancelled. What a pain! The guy threw everything that he could at me: discounts, special deals, "faster" service, etc. Of course, I managed to get the account cancelled in the end, but it cost me an hour of my life that I'll never get back.

Now, someone named Vincent Ferrari came across the exact same problem. He recorded his conversation with the AOL customer service guy. The AOL dude managed to harass him by the end of the conversation and, thankfully, Vincent put up with it and got his account cancelled. So, Vincent posted the audio clip on the Interweb, which is now spreading like wildfire. I managed to find out about this story from MSNBC, who interviewed Vincent.

Here is an account of a former AOL customer service rep and why they are such douchebags:

About 5 years ago, I worked in the 'retention' department of AOL through a third party vendor (I was desperate, it paid 2 bucks an hour more then the job I had, and I had to change jobs ASAP for reasons that have nothing to do with this post). As it was so long ago, I don't remember the exact numbers, but there was a very strict quota in how many people you had to talk out of canceling the account (I believe it was close to 65%).

I worked through the FOUR week training period, and 1 hour on the actual floor.

There were several very strange things about this job.

1. The trainer was this very perky guy who reminded me a lot of a zelous[sic] religious motivational speaker. He was straight out of the Frat House, and had that real "Yes Man" attitude. He jumped up and down a lot, and was VERY excited to be part of 'AOL's WONDERFUL team'.

2. If you were late, be it coming back from a break, lunch or first thing in the morning, you were forced to stand up in front of the class (there were about 35 people in the class), and sing silly songs like the Theme from SpongeBob Square Pants. Not only was everyone else forced to listen to this, you were also forced to participate. So, essentially everyone got in trouble. If the whole class did not sing along, we kept doing it over and over until everyone did. Remember, this is a class of fully grown adults.

3. We were told very specifically that if a customer wishes to speak with a supervisor, to do ANYTHING possible to make that NOT happen. We were instructed that we should say they were 'at lunch' or 'on another call' or anything we could think of so the supervisors did not have to speak to the customer. Often times, other reps would get on the phone and pretend to be supervisors.

4. There were several 'steps' that you HAD to follow in the call flow process. It had some silly little catch phrase so that you could remember it. Over 75% of your calls were monitored, and if you did not follow this process 90% of the time, you were fired.

I managed to make it through the four week long training process. Oh, something else I forgot to mention, no matter what kind of abuse the customer gave you, you could not hang up on them. You had to just sit there and take it.

My 10th or so call, the woman on the other line called me a Cee U Next Tuesday. I hung up on her, got my things, and walked out.

Being homeless and/or jobless wasn't worth my pride.

I remember when AOL was first picking up in prominence as a major ISP. My computer geek friends and I would refer to it as AOHell, after the name of the hacker-created program to harass AOL customers as a pretend moderator. Now, it seems like AOL is really in Hell!