AOL: Afterlife Online?
I am sure many of you have heard that cancelling an AOL account can be quite a nightmare. For those of you who missed it, there is a wonderful piece on one blogger’s experience on Insignificant Thoughts and the audio recording of his experience cancelling his AOL account is on Putfile.com.
One would think that after this story was exposed last summer that AOL would change its ways. Think again.
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, my father passed away. Since then, my sister and I have been working with my mom to put her accounts in order, cancel those not needed anymore, etc.
So it turns out that my parents had been paying for an AOL account that they had not used for more than a year. They moved to Florida in January 2006 and just never got around to setting up their computer. So when we discovered that they were still paying the monthly fee for AOL, we called to cancel the account. After all, my mom doesn’t know how to use the computer and my father, well, he can’t anymore.
We called AOL and asked them to cancel the account because my father had passed away. Instead of offering condolences and helping us resolve the request, the AOL customer service person said they could only cancel the account with the written authorization of the person who set the account up… my father.
Again, we told AOL he cannot do that, he is dead.
No luck. And they continued to block our efforts to cancel the account.
My sister is still working with my mom on this. They are still waiting for the forms to fill out. And AOL still wants us to resurrect my dad so he can authorize the transaction.
Stay tuned. I will let you know when we succeed.