Customer "service", AOL-style.

You know, not unlike the way that a bull services a cow.

Very funny article in the NY Times yesterday about someone's attempts to cancel his AOL account. Funny, that is, so long as it doesn't happen to you. It took a 21-minute phone call, 15 of which was waiting to talk to a live person. The best part was the conversation with the customer service person, also known as a "retention specialist", who wouldn't let the customer cancel even though the customer used the phrase "Cancel my account" (and close variations) thirty times in that five-minute conversation.

How do we know about this conversation? The customer recorded it. At the moment, the customer's website is down because of all the hits it's received, but YouTube has an NBC news story about the conversation, including a lot of the call.