A writer friend of mine recently sent me a link to an AOL support site he wrote, and I didn’t think anything of it or even wonder why I’d want to look at it, but then I checked it out and I totally get it. AOL users are stuck in the 90s and a lot of them just don’t get the internet at all. This customer help site is so ridiculous.
Here are a couple of highlights:
If you go to the Contact a Live AOL Rep page, you can click on any link you want, it doesn’t matter, and it will take you t a page with more links to click, and to more links, and to more and more and more. Pretty soon you’ll figure out that you’re caught in a circle jerk. The pages just keep taking you around in circles (or giving you an error message) until you lose your mind. It’s a lot like the way trying to get help from AOL actually is.
If you look at the page about disconnecting your AOL service, it’s more of the same. You click the links, fill in the boxes, do whatever you want and it doesn’t matter, it just keeps taking you to the next page, and there’s never an end to it, it just keeps getting more absurd and frustrating.
Last one I’ll point out is the Too much AOL spam page, which has terrible, terrible advice for dealing with spam. Everything you could do wrong is mentioned, but these things all seem believable to AOL users, apparently.
It’s a bit unusual for a joke site because it has tons and tons of content. The guy that wrote it told me he did it years ago trying to be clever, but it didn’t really catch on. He put a lot of wok into it, I’ll say that much at least.