John P.

One Mans Blog

Specialization is for Insects.

Impossible to Cancel AOL Account

Have you ever had difficulty trying to cancel an account with a service provider? Well Vincent Ferrari sure did, and frankly you aren’t going to believe what he went through.

Luckily he taped the call so he could share it with the rest of us!
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How to Reach a Human When Calling Any Company

Get HumanEveryone has been driven crazy by a poorly staffed call center, sitting behind a horrible Interactive Voice Response Unit (IVRU) while calling a service provider like the phone company, cable company, government office or technical support. Well, help has now arrived.

Paul English, the CTO of Kayak.com, decided to build a site to help people get through to a real human after one such frustrating call. The result is GetHuman.com.
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InternetOn October 8, 1993 CBS ran the following news article entitled A network called ‘Internet’. It’s fascinating to look back at the early days, and I recall them very well. In fact, by the time this video aired I had been online for years, and had even been selling PCs with modems and Internet connectivity via CompuServe and Prodigy since 1990.

In the earliest days of consumer Internet adoption, the first big ISP was CompuServe. It was not unusual in the early 1980s to have to pay a $30-per-hour charge (that would be $21,600 per month!) for a dial-up connection speed of 1200 bps. That’s just over 1 Kb - on a good day - as compared to our current broadband connections that normally exceed 1,500,000 bps or 1,250 times the original speed.
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