Shit, Obsidian, that voice was you? :eek:
Sorry for cursing you out then…
(I’m kidding. Maybe.).
As an aside, there have been a few articles recently over here about Indians in Bangalore being immersed in UK culture, watching UK soaps and listening to UK radio, and taking elocution lessons to fool UK customers as to their location.
Obsidian, let me know when you decide to quit. I want to fly out there with a video camera and a cell phone for you to use. All you have to do is help get me in the door. q;}
um, King George Computers in KG Virginia was my first ISP, and here in Orange Park, I’m with Comcast (which was ATT which was something else when we first moved here.)
No, I’m not a liar, you weeniehead! 
We get the occasional AOL or earthlink disk, and they go right into the trash with the rest of the junk mail.
FWIW, I had to go AOL for 2 months while getting my DSL switched over to our new house. For some reason we’re not provisioned for DSL so had to go Cable modem. Again, the AOL was a stop-gap.
It took me 3HOURS to get through to the putz that I was trying to cancel the trial service. The time was mostly spent waiting for the computer to come back online.
Flash forward 6 months.
Still getting the fucking CD’s at a rate of 4/week. This is really clogging the mailbox, since there are times we don’t check the mail for 2-3 days at a time. Keep in mind, their computers often are out-of-service.
We have and unlisted/unpublished number. In addition, the number is blocked from caller-ID.
When I called to tell them to save themselves the disks, without giving our name/address/phone #, the customer “service” rep said we were taken off the mailing list.
WTF?!? They can’t seem to get thier shit together to cancel an account, but can somehow decifer my phone number? She answered me by name and said our address was cancelled, though I gave her neither.
BTW, it’s my own damn fault. I knew going into this that AOL is evil. But it was fun hammering the poor sack that had to take my calls. These people are worse than bill collecters
Thank you for the incentive! I finally cancelled my AOL account… I stopped using it about 6 months ago but kept it ‘just in case’. I started the call with the line…are your computers working… hehe.
Yes, this is very common. We employ linguistics people and have extensive cultural training. Much of it is, essentially, to try and fool the customer.
Some of it, however, is needed to bridge basic cultural gaps. For example, in India the two phrases, “What’s your problem?” and “How can I help you?” mean exactly the same thing. Agents have to learn that in the US (I don’t know enough about speech patterns in the UK to say for you guys), the former would be seen as rude.
Oddly enough, I was doing more voice recordings today, for a Brittish company. My boss asked me if could do the recording in a Brittish accent, because customers might hear my American accent and not like it. I maintain that anyone born and raised in the brittish isles can tell a chick from New Jersey faking an accent from a mile away, and it would only be worse. Somebody back me up here.
IME, it’s easier to complain to your credit card company than to get AOL to credit you anything. I’ve used AOL on several separate occasions, with varying degrees of success in cancelling it. The last time I did it, I just said, “No, I want to leave” about fifteen times and eventually they went along.
I’ve managed to cancel an AOL account in one call, but I had to say I was terminally ill and would be too dead to enjoy the free months they were offering me.
I must have gotten the softies. Either that, or it’s because I told them that I just used their service when my cable provider wasn’t working (true) and was cancelling because it was up and running now. When they talked about their other offerings besides dialup, I just said no thanks, whole household is wired for cable, husband uses it too, and they backed down.
They mean the same thing in New Jersey too, don’t they?
WHen I needed to cancel, I was stuck on the phone for 20 minutes. I just kept repeating “I’m not interested, please cancel my account” until he finally did. It was very frustrating.
I grabbed a free cd at a grocery store back in October when I got a computer.
I set it up on my fathers phone number as I have no credit cards and don’t qualify for any (never had any)and no bank account.
I just called to cancel and they gave me a free month.
I told them the phone number is my fathers and not mine and he was planning on declaring bankrupty someday soon so they wouldn’t get paid anyway if they tried.
I will cancell in 1 month.
Yeah, I think the Joisey accent would leap out from behind the British one pretty badly.
I used to work for a large computer company that does business only over the phone or internet, and the system we used for sales would crash fairly often. When this would happen we were told to inform our customers that we’re sorry, but ‘our systems are updating,’ and then we’d get their information and call them back later.
What added to the fun was that our system was linked to the website and sometimes they’d both go down at the same time. Whenever this happened all the people who were trying to order online would call instead, creating massive call que time and really irate customers, who weren’t made any happier when they learned they weren’t going to be able to get their order in.
I’m not saying this was the case in Phnord’s call to AOL. It seems obvious they were giving him a line of shit, but it does happen to at least one company who you’d think would have their act together.
I signed up for AOL last month while my DSL service was down, and earlier this week I called (their phone number is right on their web site) to cancel since my DSL service seemed to have stabilized. The call took less than 10 minutes, and the person on the other end was nothing but courteous. He didn’t even try to get me to stay, but did ask why I was cancelling (as I expected him to do).
Maybe I just get lucky, but I’ve had to open and cancel several AOL accounts over the past 8 years and have never had a problem.
My husband is 44 years old. He built his first computer at age 15. He is, in Latin, a Geekus Maximus. We’ve had the internet for about 11 years. I remember when we first got it, I couldn’t email anyone because no one else I knew had it! Everyone kept saying stuff like “The internet? What do you want that for?” Hahaha. Silly little people. Anyway, hubby knew from the very first that AOL was evil incarnate, and so we have never used them. We’ve always had local ISP’s. About a year ago, we switched to digital, and we’re so pleased with it that I couldn’t imagine going back. If we move to the middle of nowhere, as we hope to do in the next year, we may be forced to go back to DSL, but never, ever, ever will we use the horror that is AOL!
Great OP! I like your style!
Phnord Prephect, I would like to thank you for posting that number. I called to cancel my AOL account today, and this was the only place I could find the number (luckily I could find it through my subscribed threads). I followed your advice, and it worked wonders!
People, people, people! Don’t throw out those unwanted AOL CDs – send them to this guy who actually wants them!
Well,
First, nice rant.
Second. I used to work for AOL in the call centers and in Network Operations. For a while I dealt with call center issues. Call centers do go down at times. There are many reasons it happens. AOL’s network is the biggest[#1] on the planet and when stuff breaks it can take a while to figure out what went wrong. Sometimes the problem lies in the NOC but most of the time, if a call center loses connectivity, it is something that broke at one particular call center. Therefore it is possible that one call center is down while the rest are working.
Third, when you ask for a supervisor at AOL and they say their supervisor is out to lunch just keep asking. Most likely their supervisor is out. But if you keep asking they should get you to another supervisor.
Slee
#1. When I was in the NOC there were ~40,000 servers in production at any given time.