I access the Internet via a Road Runner cable connection. For reasons too boring to go into, I also needed a dial-up connection so I had a subscription for $9.95 per month with a company called AllVantage that offered this…with a real nice online webmail interface and pretty good service. Recently though, AllVantage got out of this business and announced that effective July 19, they would cease offering dial-up Internet access and such, and that all our accounts would be transferred over to PeoplePC, another firm that offers much the same thing at much the same price.
Actually, PeoplePC offers a much less sophisticated webmail interface. In fact, GMail, which is free, offers a better one so the only reason I would need PeoplePC is for the dial-up connection, which I also don't need because the Road Runner people now have those available — also for free — to their cable subscribers. Which is why I don't need PeoplePC at all and decided to cancel it before they billed me. The AllVantage people not only gave them my account but also my credit card info as well, which is either a violation of some law or should be.
The trouble is that as with many such services, cancelling your account involves calling a Cancellation Department. You can't just opt out online because they want you to speak with someone whose job is to talk you out of leaving. (AllVantage does online cancellations. In fact, I don't think it's even possible to talk to a human being who works for that company, assuming there even are any.)
So I just spent an aggravating half-hour on the phone, trying to cancel a PeoplePC account I never signed up for in the first place. I always feel bad when I get annoyed with these employees who have their little script they've been ordered to follow. The lady on the phone seemed nice enough…but she was either not smart enough to realize that she couldn't keep me, or perhaps she just wasn't allowed to make that determination. She kept asking me why I wanted to cancel and what possible reasons I could have for being anything less than thrilled with PeoplePC and didn't I want to keep my account intact and give it a few more months before I did something as drastic as cancelling this account I never wanted in the first place?
I told her I didn't need a dial-up account at all. I told her I never wanted PeoplePC at all. I told her that my attempts to make telephone connection with people there had been uniformly inefficient and resulted in excrutiating hold times. I told her I didn't like their webmail interface and that it didn't serve my purposes. Somehow, she was not empowered to just write me off and close out my account then and there. She still had to put me through more questions and urge me to give them a chance to prove themselves. I kept flashing on all these guys on Fox News Channel telling us that The Surge will work if we just give it more time. And more time and more time and more time…
I think (note the boldface) I finally convinced her to close out my business with them. She gave me a 17-digit "cancellation confirmation number," which of course raises the question of why that number requires seventeen digits. Are that many people cancelling? You can write out the entire population of the planet in ten digits. Why do they need more number combinations than that?
I hope this will be my last message here about PeoplePC. And a warning to you all.