insignificantthoughts.com/page/2
June 15th, 2006 I really don't know where to start with this, to be honest, so I'm just going to turn this into the narrative to end all narratives and hope it makes some kind of sense when it's all done. Two weeks ago, Beth was registering for classes, and it forced me to take a look at my expenses and try to trim the fat as much as possible. I cancelled a bunch of extraneous bills and consolidated others. In other words, I did what I needed to do to save a buck. Frankly, the only reason I kept it was to troubleshoot some of the suits' AOL installs at work. Before I did it, I thought, "Ya know, I've heard about the horror stories with cancelling AOL, let's record this convo." What I wasn't expecting, however, was the utter assault I got the second the call started. In the back of my mind, though, I kept thinking "stay polite as long as you can; I pretty much kept my composure through most of the call. Up until the point where the guy started harassing me about what I used the computer for. As Anthony from the Opie and Anthony show put it, "Who gives a shit if I use the computer specifically to cancel AOL?" If you want me to cancel this account, you're going to let me speak and, and give this paragraph. Cause if not, we can just argue all day, I d- I really don't care, to be honest with you. But, you're going to listen to me if you want this turned off. At that point I gave in just to get the call over with, got the shpiel, got transferred to the recording that gave me the confirmation number and got the hell out of there.
I knew I was going to post it on here, I just wanted to wait a bit and see if I changed my mind. From that point on, things just started moving REALLY quickly. First, I had the bright idea to send it to Consumerist, one of my all-time favorite consumer advocacy arenas.
Hell, Joel Johnson even loved it, and we know how powerful he is (if you don't, you're an idiot; When Ben posted it, he threw a direct link to the MP3 on this site in there. As was Slobokan, LV Soda Pop, and three other sites on our server. I got 272 inbound referrals, all of which simultaneously downloaded the 3 meg MP3 In other words, server go boom.
I make no bones about it, and have written a million posts bagging on them. One thing you can't argue with, though, is that Digg is hardcore when it comes to consumer advocacy, and that's why this post went there. We were getting blasted off the internet and convincingly so. Getting in, clearing out some WordPress plugins, disabling the anti-spam stuff I was running. Finally, at around 6:30, we replaced the main page of insignificant thoughts with a banner you probably saw that said we'd be back when the server calmed down. Around 10:30 I tried to compile the logs to check the damage. AW Stats sat on the logs for almost two hours before I gave up. I burned through 31 gigabytes of bandwidth in approximately 8 hours. To put that number in perspective, I go through about 8 a month. Hitwise, I made about 510,000 hits in that time period, compared to 360,000 for a typical month. Since IT was down, and I had nothing better to do, I started reading the comments on Digg. Typically, people were behind me, but there were large chunks of people who thought I was a fraud... Two thousand diggs later, they were obviously in the minority so screw em. Checking the server logs, I saw we just had error after error after error. HTTPD (the http daemon, basically the service that serves up the pages) was up, down, up, down. My account was suspended (we thought it would help) then unsuspended (it didn't). But, with a static front page, things were calming down. The audio was gone, but were still getting bombed with hits from mirrors put up the day before by digg readers who wanted to help (I'm grateful to each and everyone of you by the way, if any of you read this). Looking through my referral logs, we were getting hundreds of hits each from Anandtech, Metafilter, Digg, Boing Boing, TotalFark, Arstechnica and Digg, not to mention people leaving continuous streams of comments on the site through the mirrors. Basically, even with the site down, I was still getting hammered. I was in one of my friends' office and I was telling a few people what had happened the day before. Then, I went back to my office, and there was a voicemail on my mobile. My audio, despite me not even submitting it to them had made it onto XM Satellite Radio, and was beamed to between 2 and 3 million listeners.
We exchanged a few e-mails and she and I scheduled an interview for Monday night at 8pm. Of course, server load has been pretty high all day, but I was managing. I also noticed that one of my heroes embarked on a new project this morning.
com, a brilliant mashup of the social news networking site Digg and real pavement-pounding journalism. In other words, Digg, but for people who don't just want a buzz story and would like some followup and investigation. Apparently, some diggers submitted it to test the integrity of Jason and his team. They ended up wearing lots of egg on their faces because of the two stories that bashed AOL, Jason left both of them. In other words, he has every bit the integrity I always knew he had. Imagine launching a site, and on launch day, you're getting assaulted by people who hate you, and you have enough confidence to just leave it all in place? Later in the day, I got an e-mail from one of the anchors at Netscape. Dakota Smith was looking for a comment from me on the story. I thought it was kinda cool that she found me, so of course I volunteered. your story about your dealings with AOL has been voted up on our site and I was hoping I could ask you a few quick questions about the whole ordeal. Sure enough, on that same story appeared the statement from AOL via spokesperson Nicholas Graham. "At AOL, we have zero-tolerance for customer care incidents like this - which is deeply regrettable and also absolutely inexcusable. The employee in question violated our customer service guidelines and practices, and everything that AOL believes to be important in customer care - chief among them being respect for the member, and swiftly honoring their requests. This matter was dealt with immediately and appropriately, and the employee cited here is no longer with the Company." I had never actually complained, although I did bag Jon really badly in a survey about my experience with him, but somehow it got back to AOL and they shitcanned him. Makes you wonder how many other times he did this kind of thing, huh? Then came the time to do my interview for Netscape: Netscape Anchor Dakota Smith conducted an IM interview with Vincent Ferrari, the blogger behind Insignificant Thoughts and a 30-year-old Bronx resident, this morning. Here's an excerpt of their IM exchange: Dakota: What led you to post this? Ferrari: Well, I had heard the horror stories about canceling AOL, and decided to post it. Honestly, I'm always looking for something interesting on my site, and this seemed to be something my readers would be interested in. Dakota: For you, what was the most surprising part of the whole exchange? I mean, I'm 30 years old, and both the card and the account are in my name.... I couldn't believe he was going to make me wait just so he could cancel my account. Ferrari: All I got from them afterward was a survey that asked (ironically enough) if Jonathan met my needs. It sucks that he got fired, but maybe he'll learn from it. Dakota: Is it just AOL, you think, or just the nature of customer service in general? Ferrari: Well, I think it is actually the nature of customer service to be honest. I think retention people are particularly bad because they can never accept that someone wants to cancel... Ferrari: If I'm predisposed to canceling, just let me do it. Ferrari: I don't mind a token effort, but aggressive pursuing is really not appropriate. Ferrari: Jonathan was definitely aggressive about it and wasn't listening to me at all. Dakota: They must be so bored with their jobs that they lash out... Their performance is basically "how many people did you keep today?" Ferrari: Doesn't make him a bad person, just a guy in the wrong position for h...
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