Post your "disconnecting from AOL" horror stories here...

[Archae]

"20/20" last night did a show on this (I missed it,) a friend of mine had to threaten them with legal action before they disconnected him and stopped billing him.

[qnr]

1. Sorry, never used AOL. n/t

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. I haven't had AOHell for years; I dumped them back when it was easy.

But my 86-year-old dad, who is addicted to the Internet, had one heckofa time getting rid of them. Recenctly, when he got high-speed cable service at his retirement community (which he calls "the joint" or "the gulag"), he called up AOL to terminate their service. My brother and I were in the other room, eavesdropping on dad's side of the conversation, which went something like this:

"I'd like to disconnect my service and close my account."
"No, I don't want to hear about new features. I want to close my account."
"Yes. I want to close my account."
"Because I'm getting high-speed service."
"It's through my cable system."
"No, I don't want AOL any more."
"I'm not interested in any new features."
"No. Just close my account."

The conversation went on in this vein for about 10 minutes, until:

"Dammit! I said close my account, and do it NOW!"

Apparently the AOL gnome gave up at this point. My brother and I were laughing our asses off by this time. Then we had to get into his computer and clear out all the AOL bloatware that was hiding in it. We discovered you can't do a normal deletion -- you have to dig through all the files and manually dump anything labeled AOL.They did stop billing for the service, but AOL would seem to be as unpleasantly tenacious as a case of herpes.

[Bluestar]

3. AOL--Amateurs on line n/t

[Oeditpus Rex]

4. AOL's free now if you have another ISP

So why bother going through all that shit? :shrug:

[Downtown Hound]

5. This video pretty much sums it up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaaAYVUWP0I

AOL is evil incarnate.

[Cathyclysmic]

6. I used to work at a bank call center...

I had AOL's phone number and monthly charges ($22.71) memorized because so many people were screwed by them. They just make it very difficult to cancel the automatic debit.

[momophile]

7. it took me about a year and several phone calls

to get them to stop sending past due notices and collection threats. I kept taking names of everyone I talked with and telling it to the next person. finally, they stopped.

[InvisibleTouch]

8. I've gotten free trial periods from AOL on several occasions...

...and every time I called to cancel, they'd offer me another 30 days free. Hoping, of course, that I'd miss the deadline for cancellation the following month, and then they could hit me with a monster bill that was over twice what other dial-up ISPs charge for the exact same service. Forgetting to cancel in time was a very real possibility for me, because I'm not so good with deadlines and remembering to pay bills on time and the like - but I made a concentrated effort, and always called to cancel just in time. On more than one occasion, I ended up with about 6 months of free "30-day trial" service that way. But I knew it was only a matter of time before I'd miss my deadline, so finally I'd insist (and I would have to insist) that they cancel my subscription.

Then a few weeks later I'd get a card in the mail that offered a 30-day free trial if I'd come back ... and the cycle would start all over again. I think they finally got wise to me, because I haven't had an offer from them in quite some time. :) But during those lean months, it sure was nice to have unlimited hours of free dial-up.