AOL=POS

So obviously I'm back online and the cable bill is paid. But in those 36 hours of online-less-ness, I have learned an important lesson which I will pass along to you, my dearies:

America Online sucks massive donkey balls.

America Online via dial-up? Sucks massive pustulent syphillitic donkey balls.

I ran the phone cord across the living room at about 7:00 last night in an effort to get online by installing the dial-up version of AOL from one of the eleventy-thousand AOL disks that bombard me with promises of 1099 free hours over 50 days. (Just by the way? To use those hours up, you would have to stay online for 23 hours, 50 minutes, 58.8 seconds. Every DAY. That's as useful as offering a billion bananas all at once. You can eat some, you can give some away, but in a very short time all you're gonna have is a bunch of rotten bananas.) So I installed the software, plugged in the line, and clicked "new user".

It dialled the "get access number" number. Then dialled it again. And again, and again, and again, in an endless loop which never connected.

I called tech support--it took me ten minutes just to find the number in the help files, which I'm sure is exactly what they intended!--and got India. At least, I think it was India. It was not helpful, wherever it was. I said "I need a new modem string" and she said "No you don't" and told me to install an earlier version of AOL and try that.

So I installed AOL 8.0 and tried that. Same result. I went into my AOL 7.0 and dug out the old access number, and looked for where I could input it. I couldn't. It kept telling me to create a new location, and then dialled the number that never connected.

Finally, AOL 8.0 let me through, after ten squazillion tries. It got the access numbers, but then whenever it dialled them it kept disconnecting. Twice I got as far as to put my name and credit-card number in before it booted me off without letting me create a user name. But that was twice out of about 150 tries.

At 11:00--four hours later--I gave up.

I have no great love for Comcast--they'll cut you off as soon as look at you--but damn, I'm glad I've got 'em.

It's good to be back.