I'm spending the summer in the employ of the Kanawha County Commission here in Charleston.  We are currently in the process of putting together a web page for the county, in order to provide more accessible info to the citizens of the region.  This project actually being done by a local high school student, who came in this afternoon to meet with me about what info we actually wanted.  I mistakenly thought he had already thrown some basic stuff up on the Web, so I thought I should look at it before he arrived.  My link to the Net is here at home, so I was forced to make do with the preinstalled software on the machine in my office (A recently purchased laptop). 

I had a few choices, but the only service that promised up front to have a free trial was America On-Line.  My plan was to install my own software on Monday, so I only needed AOL for the day, and only for a few minutes at that.  The entire process ended up taking about three hours. 

Firstly, I had to install the thing.  My boss (who is an AOL customer) already had his setup on the machine, so I decided to do my own.  I wouldn't want to mooch of his account, anyway, and I THOUGHT this would easier.  Huh.  One of the first things AOL does is to detect the other version installed on the machine.  No problem, I'll just tell it to install to a different directory.  Not so fast.  Instead of popping up a spot to put the directory I want to use, I need to tell it to NOT install in the other directory first.  That frustrated me for a few minutes.  All the software I've ever installed in my life let you tell it where to go first, then talked about updates.  I guess this is progress? 

Next was to set up the phone numbers to work in the local area.  First, AOL dials an 800 toll-free number to get signed on initially.  After I set it up to dial 9 to get out of our office, it came time to pick my local numbers (two, since one is almost always guaranteed to be busy).  After doing so, it flashed the numbers up to confirm.  Missing was the 9.  I figured that meant I had to add it to both numbers.  Wrong again.  AOL decides to carry the 9 without telling me.  This resulted in a call to God-knows-where, probably Jersey, which got some poor guy's answering machine (blaring thru the modem, which is 10 times louder than any other I've ever heard.  So, if your machine recorded a bunch of noise this afternoon, I apologize. 

After I got the phone thing straightened out, it was time to actually register.  To me it was funny that AOL got your financial information before you got an address, but that's just me.  In fact, why they need financial information at all for a "free" trial is beyond me.  The answer, of course, is that once you log on, you are an AOHell member until you tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine.  If you forget about it in the meantime and get charged for a bunch of time you don't use, that's your problem.¹ The one nice thing I noticed was that they allow you to use a CheckCard (debit card) for payment, which is nice.  When it finally comes time for me to pick an address, I find that my first several choices are already taken.  By whom I have no idea, as they were pretty obscure. 

With an address set, it's finally time to hit the service itself.  Now, I only needed to get no the Web, but I couldn't resist the ever-famous "You've got mail!" that greeted me.  Just promotional BS, but it's nice to know they care.  I spent the next several minutes trying to find the right doorway to the Web on AOHell's little start up page.  But as the song says, "every single door that I walk through takes me back here again," which at this point was a mounting frustration.  For what it's worth there was no Help topic in the index labeled "Internet."  Nice, huh?  Finally, while plodding thru the pull-down menus I found a thing called favorite sites, in which I put my home page.  That should work, I thought, and miraculously, it did!  Once I was on the Web, things weren't all that bad. 

Anyway, cut to the chase.  Our web designer stopped by, and it turned out he didn't have anything up, anyway.  What a waste of time, right?  Hell, I haven't even cancelled my account yet! 

I didn't want to end up forgetting about this account when I went back to school here in a few weeks, so I decided to call the AOHell people and get things settled.  I remembered a phone number to call to discuss billing when I was going thru the registration process.  I didn't write it down, because I figured that it would be readily available on-line.  WRONG!  Nowhere in all the billing helps and online info was there any reference to a phone number! 

I thought the easiest thing (and maybe the only thing) to do would be to install a third version on this machine and stop the registration process when I found the phone number.  After all the usual stuff, I finally got the number.  I called.  It took thirty seconds to just get to a real answer, not an ad for services.  I finally got to a human being, a polite woman, who gleaned the fact that I had only been a member for three hours.  She asked if there was anything wrong, and I promptly told her all the stuff I've gone through.  She asked if another free month would help, and I told her that I was very happy with my local service, MountainNet.  Thankfully, she posed little resistance and cancelled my account.  I guess I'll have to wait until September to figure out if they got that right. 

So, what did I learn?  Everything I've heard about AOHell is true.  And for anyone out there looking in via AOL: I'm sorry. :)