Escaped from AOhell

[PHOTO OF ME ON HORSE IS MISSING>>OTHERWISE, THIS WOULD MAKE MORE SENSE!! AND I DON'T KNOW WHY IM YELLING!!]

Welcome to the CatheB Monthly den of babble-on. And yes, that is my natural hair color, when the check clears. I'm not praying, those are reins. When in San Francisco, I highly recommend the beach side riding stables by Ocean Beach, and Lake Merced. It's Mid September...on with the stuff...........

We call this month's Episode:

Escape from AO-HELL............

The loyal following has been trying to find me, and a little office on the East Coast is preventing it. Apparently AOL is not friendly to people who DO NOT OWN CREDIT CARDS. The company would take monthly chunks out of my bank account, at an additional cost to me. This past month, the payment date fell on the rent due date. To make a long story funny, without a single note saying "hey, pay us", my account was rendered, "INVALID". This happened the same day as the announcement that Compuserve was now rendered impotent.....I mean was now part of AOL's little trust, I mean, mafia, I mean, business.

There were 25 webpages I had bled over on that server. So, I called the happy little computer activated voice customer service geek system. I was told...."reload the software and sign on as a new member". But what about all of my old pages? "Don't you have a credit card to reactivate the account?" No. That is why you were using my checking account as your own personal teller machine into every dime I ever owned. And it wasn't enough for the first time in 4 years, so you let me go like an ex wife. "You have six months to reactivate your account, then all the information will be removed." Uh, okay. And when I turn 18, do I get to move out? Luckily I am one of those geeky folks who has everything backed up on disks. So, by next month's commentary, the archive files will be returning.....including those rescued and retagged from AO-Hell.

AND to add annoyance, the dorks in charge in Atlanta have decided that if you no longer have an AOL account, and people email you, a rather RUDE message gets sent back from the mailer daemon. Try it, and you will be asked to check out Idiot.com. No lie. That's a little bit of Ted Turner humor, I suppose, since AOL is his world.

While I was "one of them", I enjoyed two chat arenas. One was (is) called Improv Online. There were quite a few stand ups who sipped daquairis while typing madly about the topics du jour. There was a fan club of comic groupies who really helped keep us on our toes. The other was Heckler's Online. For anyone who is a comedian, and a member of AOL, spending 30 minutes in this chat room will do nothing but speed up the brain processing. That was the good part of AOL for me.

The CRAP was getting lotsa unsolicited real time messages from guys who were playing slappy hand while I was trying to get into the classifieds and apartment hunt. How about setting up a list of preferences that was supposed to De-spam my mail, and then still having to spend 20 minutes discovering the crap that had slipped by the "fool proof" system.

That will serve as my forty-six point three cents worth today. There are newsgroups devoted to nothing but hate of AOL......hmmmm, now I have a plan for the weekend.

Pass the word like a cootie......