It's the end of the world! Hell hath frozen over!....

Why you ask? Because I created an AOL Account today. I deleted it 8 minutes later, but still. Before you call out the men in white coats, let me explain myself. So I'm browsing the web, and I see one of those "hit the target and win!" animated ads. Normally, I ignore those, but this one said "Win a 20GB IPOD! FREE!" and I was hooked. I blasted the target and was whisked away to a promotion website. Now, unlike most shoddy promo sites, this one had a BBBOnline logo in the corner, so I ran the company name through the BBB and lo and behold it was legit. So after filling in some blanks, and suffering through a useless survey, I get to the prize reclamation page, or so I think. Before me are 10 "offers". Join a book club for the low intro price of $30 a month, Save 40% on my next online cow purchase, get a free 45 day trial of AOL, Get 10CD's for the price of 1, that kind of stuff. In order to claim my prize, I have to process through one of these offers...

Pretend your me (hopelessly addicted to shiny, blinking things) and the only thing between you and an IPOD is some lame free trial offer for the one of the worst ISP's in the country...What do you do?

About 2 minutes after I finished degrading myself like a shameless heroin addict, I received an email about my prize! Oh wait, before I get my prize, I have to con 6 of my friends into signing up AND COMPLETING one of the promotions... No quick and easy create/cancel type stuff. Needless to say, I refuse to con more than 3 or 4 friends for the sake of a new toy....If they had said 2, I woulda gone for it.

To hell with this bait and switch! Angrily, I log onto AOL's website, looking for the "Cancel this Crap" button...And there is none! You have to call AOL to cancel, and speak with someone who's goal is to get you to not cancel. Oh I wouldn't want to be this guy.

Riiiiiing....Riiiiiiiing.....Bleep, connecting you to a Customer Account Specialist....

AOL: Hi! My name is Karl, How can I help you today!

Sev: Hi Karl, I'm Sev, and I'd like to cancel an Account!

AOL: That's to bad! Let me pull up your account details....(information was exchanged)

AOL: Hmmmm.....It looks like this account was created today...

Sev: yup, about 7 minutes ago.

AOL: Wow, why don't you like the service?

Sev: well Karl, I connected to AOL, and almost as soon as I heard "you've got Mail" sparks shot out of the back of my PC, and my screen went black...

AOL: ....Oh my....

Sev: no, just messin with you (evil laugh) In all honesty I entered into this promotion for a free IPOD, and signing up for AOL was the least evil of the options they gave me to finalize the transaction. Believe me when I say Karl, there Isn't much I wouldn't resort to for a free IPOD...

AOL: you had no intention of using the service?

SEV: (Laugh) ....oh, you were serious? no, sorry, no. I got an email from the promotion company after I signed up saying I had to Con 6 friends into joining before I could get my IPOD, and frankly, that wasn't gonna happen. Their not stupid.

AOL: Well, I don't know that you'd have to con any...

Sev: Are we joking again? no seriously, are we? I'd hate to burst your happy bubble Karl, but I've probably fielded more AOL Horror story tech support calls than you have. I just wanted a free IPOD, you understand, right? So can we just cancel this thing and I can go plot something else to get an IPOD...

AOL: um....OK...lemme set it up real fast...

Sev: Do you have an IPOD Karl? Because if you do, we might be able to make this work after all.....

AOL: No sir, you Confirmation number is (XXXXXXXXX)....have a...nice day.


Now you understand. Actually, throughout history, many evils have been committed on behalf of free stuff. I read somewhere that Pizarro thought the Incas were hoarding IPODS, that's why he killed them all....