8 Annoying Things About AOL

I have had AOL for about ten years. When I think of all the annoying little things about AOL, I wonder why I continue to use it. I guess because changing from AOL to another email account seems like too much of an inconvenience. But then again, is AOL really convenient? Here are some of the little things that annoy me about AOL.

1. If you don't pay for the plan, you can't get any help at all. AOL went through its big transition a while ago, offering customers free service so all the people switching over to DSL and broadband would hang around to read their sponsors ads. So now, you can pay for DSL and keep AOL messenger (oooh, ahhh) and your AOL addresses and not have to pay if they're not your ISP. Only thing is, if something goes wrong, there's not tech support. I find this to be a little idiotic. If I have an account with Yahoo, free, I can get tech support if I need it. If I an account with different websites, I can get tech support if I need it. But if I use AOL, no such luck. Oh- unless I sign up for the $9.95 a month plan, get my tech support, than cancel the plan before I have to pay for it and then go back to free. Yeah, that's a great system.

2. "Your pricing plan this billing cycle is unlimited use." All right, it's bad enough when I had a paying plan that every time I switched screenames, I got this dialog box telling me how long I'd been online (which is fine) and what my billing plan was. I mean, did you ever meet anyone who was paying AOL by the hour or something? ( I guess back in the day some people did and AOL charged them for extra time and got sued, so now we all get to know our exact minute count.... ) But now that I don't have a billing plan, I get the same box. If I don't have a billing plan, why are you telling me what my billing plan is? And why do I need to go through this procedure when I switch screen names if my passwords are pre-entered? Maybe this little annoying box has some other purpose, and they're just camouflaging it with the stuff they put in it. HM..

3. AOL Toolbar Menu Favorites. I love things on AOL that are mandatory. It's mandatory, for example, to have an AOL toolbar menu folder in your favorites list even if you never use it, not even once, and even if you have to keep closing it because it spontaneously opens when you use your favorites list and even if its just taking up space on an already long favorites list. You have to have it. It's manadatory, undeletable. It's AOL.

4. AOL menu bar or welcome screen: you decide. Here's another annoying thing about AOL: mandatory screen clutter. You have to either have the big welcome screen up, or you have to have the search list, or whatever you call it, up- or at least minimized. You close the Welcome Screen, here comes the search list. Try to close the search list, no can do. All you can do is minimize it. There's no way to have a nice, clean screen without any AOL boxes or menus. Mandatory clutter from AOL.

5. World's cheesiest headlines. AOL says you can customize your welcome screen. There's a few options like 'small business' and 'Black voices' and 'Latino.' But where is 'No crap.' ? AOL's Welcome page every day consists of usually celeb-related news stories with cheesy headlines, stories that you often have to go through five other websites or menu items to get to (The 10 most influential women in show business, in a special section of a special sub-section of a second section of Forbes.com's website which you reach by clicking through this other thing on...) They also run the same informational articles all the time 'Find free stuff online' , for example, and just keep changing the headline so you think it's something new (until you wise up and realize it isn't....). I haven't tried Latino voices, but I can't imagine any of this is better in Spanish.

6. Updates into oblivion. The other day, an AOL dialog box popped up in the corner of my screen every fifteen minutes for probably six hours telling me AOL needed to update. When I finally let the thing proceed, it shrunk the welcome screen, made everything a little fancier and then....it all changed back to the same as it was a day later. So, after all this annoyance, I get updated and then the update doesn't even last, and, obviously, I can't ask tech support about it- BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ANY!

7. Expressions from the past. AOL has this big list of icons, avatars, welcome sounds and other assorted self-expression items you can use to dress up your AOL experience. However, a lot of these things seem like they were last updated five years ago. I realize the kids may still like Austin Powers, and god knows I use my Dr. Evil 'you've got fricking mail' sound. But, it's 2007 not 2003. Bridget Jones IM icon? Sure. That James Bond movie that's already on DVD? Sure. Or pick any number of Garfield movie wallpapers. What the ?

Of course there are tons more to choose from if you want to go to their 'IM Product Blog' where a person named Erin with waaay too much free time blogs on a regular basis about the cool new avitars and emoticons she finds. Yeah...

8. Try Again. In the last six months, at least, 80% of the time I click my desktop icon to get AOL, I get a message telling me that the system is going to have to shut down and restart my computer to reinstall something that needs to be reinstalled. I have to then close AOL, try again, and eventually, AOL will launch. I don't know what make AOL fail to launch and then, one click later, launch without problem. But it's really annoying. I actually avoid using AOL on that computer because of it. I guess one day I should just let it reinstall everything to see if it will do anything. Given their other updates, I'm guessing it won't do much.