This page looks like crap with the AOL browser.
Anyway, it appears that the standard bearer of stupidity and slowness of the online world has failed to claim another victim. My aunt and uncle have made two dire mistakes. The first has nothing to do with this column, but I need to rant about it anyway. Their error was in purchasing a better system than those that can be found in the den. This, however, was farily minor in comparison to their second and more recent mistake. They threw themselves to the fickle mercies of that thuggish demigod of the online world, America Online.
Pertty quickly, it was fairly obvious that it was a mistake. The ease of use and blazing speed (or lack thereof) manifest itself very quickly.It didn't take long for Tarzan and Jane (OBVIOUSLY not their real names, but I've always wanted to do that for some reason) to realize their error. Many of you are familiar with the class action lawsuits againsta AOL about how easy it is to enroll and how difficult it is to cancel the service. A necessary part of their penance for the mistake involved the trial by ordeal of cancelling the service (or lack thereof.)
(For those of you who haven't seen the raw speed of AOL's Web Browser, a simulation has been created by someone who has experienced a "Season in Hades" with AOL. This can be accessed from here. A word of warning comes with this, however. This is a potentially hazardous web site, both to your computer and your sanity.
When they called to cancel, they complained that the service was too slow. The fact that AOL is slow is a well-known fact. It seems, however, that AOL's customer service people have been brainwashed somehow to deny this fact. First of all, they were told that their modem was too slow. this was unlikely, considering that it was a 33.6K modem! When they pointed this out the the customer service rep, they were told that they were wrong, and that such a modem doesn't even exist! Next, they were told that they lived in a rural area somewhere, hence the slowness. My aunt promptly pointed out that they could look out their back window and see both Microsoft AND Nintendo, asking just how rural that was. They managed to endure, however, and successfully cancelled their AOL account. They are now seeking a new ISP and are recovering well from their ugly encounter with AOL.
I am assuming that most of my readers are well-educated enough to avoid the AOL trap. For those of you who have any wild ideas about actually joining AOL, there is help available on the net. The most helpful of these sites is the alt.aol-sucks homepage. This site contains plenty of compelling reasons to avoid AOL at all costs, as well as a logo program designed to keep AOL users off of our well-planned Web sites. As you may have already noticed, I have already added this to my site.
Another site with convincing arguments to avoid AOL is located at www.aolsucks.org. This site can be somewhat slow to load the pages (which is probably carefully designed into the Web site to keep AOL users away), but contains more convincing arguments, and documentation of an attempt by AOL to shut down the site.
As the Internet becomes more prevalent in everyday life, AOL is running scared, leaving an endless trail of floppies behind. Thanks to this, many of us haven't had to buy a box of floppies in years. In fact, I have a challenge if any of my readers are programmers: Write a TSR that can detect when an AOL disk is placed in the drive, and automatically reformat the disk. This would save plenty of time and keystrokes for those of us who have to type in DOS commands to reformat floppies. If anybody whop reads this is up to the challenge, feel free to E-mail me about it. Perhaps this could be used to help keep others from being lured to the Dark Side.
If any AOL users have actually made the mistake of loading this page on their Web browser, I pity you. Just don't blame me when you walk into bankruptcy court.