<p>Back about 100 years ago, I got an AOL account. Everyone in the family could get e-mail (no user names longer than 10 characters!), they had good homework help (there was no Wikipedia, and on-line encyclopedias required subscriptions), . . . I just paid them another monthly $25.90, and now I’m wondering what I’m paying for. In a quick look around, it seems like I’ve been paying the highest monthly fee possible (for dial-up! we haven’t had that for years!!).</p>
<p>I guess what I’m asking is who out there is paying a monthly AOL fee? What do you get for it? Do you think it’s worth it? (And yes–I’ve been incredibly stupid about this, but I’ve been busy the last decade or so.)</p>
<p>Check on the other options. If you have cable tv bundle it with their modem- the fastest speeds for general public use. DSL is slower, but faster than dial up. So many email account options you don’t need your provider for that anymore.</p>
<p>I didn’t even realize AOL was still charging people. I have an AOL email account that is free. I use to pay for AOL (back in the dark ages when dial-up was your only option) but years ago they did away with the fee for just an AOL email account (same user name since 1994). It’s still my primary email account. You can still get to the rest of their website without paying anything.</p>
<p>oh ingerp, I’m afraid you may have been had. Presumably you have wireless through your local cable company and you are not paying AOL for your internet connnection?? You should for sure not be paying AOL for an e-mail account. I tried to cancel ours years ago when we moved to cable internet and first they did cancel it, but then they offered free e-mail, which you should have been getting all along. Many other companies offer free e-mail. I don’t ever use our AOL e-mail account, but it’s still out there.</p>
<p>Oh we’ve had DSL for years. I totally forgot that AOL used to be our “ISP”. I just went into my AOL account (not easy to do!) and changed to the free subscription.</p>
<p>Now who’s going to tell me how to keep this from making steam come out of my ears? I’m sure it’s not worth it to try to recover any money. This is really all my fault. It’s not even 2:00 PM on the east coast. Way too early to drink?</p>
<p>I suppose it couldn’t hurt to send an e-mail, maybe there is some free service owned by the AOL group of companies that they could give you to compensate for your years of dedication and loyalty… :)</p>
<p>I just checked my free AOL email account. There were 297 messages including a whole bunch of alerts from the CC forum. At least I am not paying for the service I don’t use.</p>
<p>The one thing you get when you pay for AOL is technical support. I’ve used AOL for decades (yikes!), but like others switched to the free account years ago. On the very rare times I’ve had problems with AOL software, AOL would not help me with telephone support. I guess that means I’ll have to live with AOL 9.1 versus AOL 9.5, but it is certainly not worth it to me to pay AOL a subscription. One of these years I’m going to switch to gmail, like the rest of my family.</p>
<p>Now that you have that sorted out - ask yourself why you’re paying for a land-line phone when you already are paying for a cell phone that’s far more effective since it’s portable.</p>
<p>That’s a question I ask myself every month when I get the land-line bill. I really should get around to cancelling it.</p>
<p>Did I just make you feel better since I’m in a similar (money wasting) dilemma or did I make you feel worse by reminding you of yet another monthly money sink with little justification?</p>
<p>sk8rmom–that’s the kind of pat on the back/there there/look on the bright side I needed.</p>
<p>MaineL–ditto.</p>
<p>edad–
Ouch.</p>
<p>dadx3–I realized that in my 20-second perusal of the subscription options. Don’t think I’ve called since getting DSL! (And I believe there’s a $7 flat fee for telephone support or something.) And most of us do have gmail accounts. My aol account is pretty much a spam collector!</p>
<p>all–I think one of my problems is this makes me feel old. This sounds like something my mother would do, not this cynical, somewhat tech-savvy fiftysomething. <sigh></sigh></p>
<p>A) Because cell phone reception at your house isn’t great, B) Because you use T-Mobile at home for your land line and it costs a mere $10/mo for unlimited calling throughout the US.</p>
<p>The only reason to pay for AOL that I know of is if you wish to use your AOL account at another location, such as a second home. Personally, I’d just go for a free email account through gmail or yahoo.</p>
<p>u<em>u</em>d–Paying the landline bill doesn’t bother me (partially because DH does that!), because we actually use the phone. I know many of the youngsters will never have their own landline, but I like that my mom has had the same phone number since 1966, I like that our phone number contains a palindrome, and after reading an article several years ago in the Washington Post about going landline-less, I knew then that I’m of an age where I’ll always have one, at least as long as we live in this house.</p>
<p>See–spending money on something that I use and that in some small way gives me pleasure I got no problem with. IT’S THE DANG $25.90/MONTH FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS THAT I GOT NOTHING IN RETURN FOR that has me a little annoyed with myself.</p>
<p>IloveLA, those type of procedures exist at most companies actually. I know at my job they used to look at how many insurance policies that each person terminated and if you had “too many” you were coached on how to retain people. Not a financial incentive or anything like that but I’m sure there were people who just weren’t doing it right so they wouldn’t get ‘talked to’ about it. I remember doing a company presentation to people on how to make an attempt at retaining customers - the right way. I transfered departments soon after and I heard they got rid of that statistic because if someone wants to cancel they want to cancel, it shouldn’t be held against you… it’s not like you made them do it.</p>
<p>I think AOL was much, much worse than other companies. When I canceled AOL, there was no way to do it online; you had to call them on the phone. The person I spoke to would not cancel my account; he insisted that I give it another month, with that month being free. Now that’s fine as a method to try to retain a customer; I had that happen when I switched cable companies. But this guy would not take “no, thanks” for an answer, and simply refused to confirm that my account would be canceled when I insisted that I was truly done with AOL and did not want another month, even if they paid me. </p>
<p>I was as polite as I could be for as long as I could be, but I was finally driven to yelling at this guy, in my frustration. I can still remember turning around to see the shocked look on the face of my 6-year-old (now 21-years-old!) S, who just could not believe Mommy was yelling so very loudly into the phone!</p>
<p>I ended up writing a letter to confirm the cancellation, and I seem to recall that that was not even the end of it; they kept charging me, and I had to dispute the charges through my credit card company. This memory is consistent with the article, which says that "AOL customer representatives received bonuses of thousands of dollars if they managed to retain about half of the people who called trying to cancel service – and that led some employees to fail to process such requests. "</p>
<p>Really, they were quite outrageous. I remember doing a google search at the time and finding one recording that a customer had made of his attempts to cancel over the phone. It was beyond absurd, but I could believe it was a true recording based on my own experience.</p>
<p>Thank you Eliot Spitzer for going after them!</p>
<p>A few years back when I discovered that my dear 80 year old mother in law was still on AOL, I asked her WHY?
The poor thing burst into tears <explaining that she was worn down by the “mean people at AOL” and she couldn’t bear to call back. I called and she was right…it was shear torture.</p>