So recently I picked up some night technical helpdesk shifts at my place of employment to kill some recent free time I have encountered this month for reasons which are not important for the reader to know.  I will also warn the reader that this article is very close to Jordan-article proportions, so you may be here awhile.  Grab a snack and a mountain dew.  Or just grab 2 mountain dews.

Anyway, I had a customer call up with a request which prompted me to get back into learning about the AOL browser and all of the wonderful little things it likes to break in Windows.  After much contemplation, and making sure that other geeks in the office could not see me, I went to the AOL site to begin the install process.

I navigated my trusty Internet Explorer 6 over to aol.com.  Since I just wanted to download and use the browser to see how the settings look on it, I went naturally to the AOL Downloads link, and found myself presented with some links.  I downloaded "AOL 9.0 Optimized", the newest version of the software that I used to receive in my mailbox every other day at home, which I play frisbee with in the yard, and which adornes my apartment wherever I need there to be a vanity mirror (I am an extremely attractive male of course, so I need many of these).  Luckily, having recently moved into a new apartment, I have been AOL CD-free for about 5 months now.

I begin to download the software, and the thing tells me that I have not registered my life with AOL and so do not actually exist yet.  It will need my credit card numbers and need to know where I have moved recently so it can send me more AOL CDs at my new apartment.  I try to fool it into believing I live in Beverly Hills 90210, but it somehow knows that I am lying, and denies me from going any further without telling them the full truth about my life.  After breaking down to confess it all, and finding the rest of my personal details and faxing my drivers license, dental records, and signed letters from my thrid and sixth grade teachers over to their friendly support staff, the program of course installs some custom "Installer" program to fill up some empty spaces it found in my registry hive, and fill up some extra space it detected on my hard drive.

It finally finishes downloading all the highly compressed bloatware, and I am presented with a warning that I have to close my 12 Internet Explorer windows, 5 copies of Notepad, 3 copies of Visual Studio, 2 MS Outlook windows, and a partridge in a pair tree. I am then presented with this custom installer where this yellow guy runs really fast across the screen, and plays some huge flash movie on my computer.  Barely able to stand looking at it, I try to minimize the window so I can load up some techno or something to make me forget that I'm installing AOL.

Well, I get it installed and I get to login to AOL.  It looks so pretty.  I am ushered through a series of 3 or 4 additional wizards which eventually leads to AOL crashing, and displaying a little “AOL has detected that it crashed and would like to apologize” window.  “Would you like to Restart the software?”.  Yes.  Yes I would.  And I’d like it to work for the next 10 minutes without crashing so I can do what I need to do and uninstall it immediately following.

I start the evil software up again and it detects that it is not the default CD player.  CD player??  Its an INTERNET BROWSER.  No, I wouldnt like to play CDs through AOL.

After finally figuring out how to load the sofware withough crashing to actually get to the point of browsing a website, I find that I cannot browse to websites.  It just hangs there for many minutes, taunting me.

I have reproduced the customer's problem.  Great (I guess).  Now its time to test out their friendly support staff.  I dont necessarily want to talk to any humans, because they probably don't speak English anyway, or they are all robots.  So I go to the online help and go to their "Live Chat With Helpful People" link thing.  The following is a paraphrased synopsis, but very close the the origional.  Real version is about 3X the size.  Names have not been changed to protect the innocent:

Welcome guest ...
Connecting to server. Please wait...
Connected to welcometoaol.mhi.aol.com
Initial Question/Comment: Other
Welcome to America Online's Live Help Area. A Customer Care Consultant will be with you shortly. 
Jimmy has joined this session!
Jimmy says, Hello! Welcome to AOL's Registration Assistance. Thanks for your interest in joining America Online! It's great to see you online today!
Jimmy says, Are you interested in starting a 50 day free trial of AOL today?
You say, nope, already got it, I can't get it to load websites through my existing non-AOL broadband service.
Jimmy says, You may contact our Technical Department toll free, at 1-800-827-3338.
You say, well are there any settings i could look at in AOL to troubleshoot this with?
Jimmy says, It should work fine. Our technical department will be able to help.
You say, you are not technical department?
Jimmy says, no
You say, right then, thanks for wasting my time, and I'll talk to ya never.
Jimmy says, welcome
Jimmy has left this session!
The session has ended!

So I call AOL, laughing to myself about how I swore I'd never talk to AOL support, and yet here I am.  I am presented with a bunch of automated options which trap me into this automated setup guide on how to download an install AOL software in 40 easy conditional steps.

Through scientific process of pressing 0 in virtually any phone system, I get out of the automated thing and get directed to a live support technician queue.

I stay on hold for about 10 mintues or so, listening to "Starry-Eyed surprise" and some easy listening love song which nearly puts me to sleep.

I spend the next 20 minutes talking to what I am pretty sure was an actual live human on the other end, though from the sounds of it, he probably just recently graduated from the "Teach yourself English as a Second Language in 30 days or less!!" online self-help course.  I was able to decipher most of what he was saying, though he had a bit more trouble understanding what I was saying.  He ended up telling me that he would have to open a "ticket on it" and "have one of the technical guys check it out and get back with me".

OK, so its been 2 days, and no call back from AOL.  I think they are still looking to hire these "technical guys".  I highly doubt they actually exist.  I kind of feel like part of a huge elaborate joke called AOL.  I'm still kind of hoping that I will wake up any second now and find that it was all a bad dream.... Still waiting.......