(A)I.M. IN HELL

I hate stupid AOL. I don't use any of their cluttered, in-your-face, badly designed, ugly interfaces or indeed their services and would rather have my toe nails pulled out with pliers than hand over any money to their stupid, evil, money-grabbing overlords, but I have always liked their AIM service in terms of it being basic, plain and efficient. I mean it's instant messenger it's hard to screw that up, even if you're AOL.

However, one thing I'm really not liking one bit is their highly irritating habit of trying to make me upgrade my version of IM every couple of months. Great, if they want to introduce new features or a new look or whatever the reason for this annoyance, go right ahead, just don't force me to do it.

I want to be able to have online conversations with my friends. That's pretty much all I want from my IM service. I don't need it to cook me dinner or teach me Swahili or beam me to the Moon, what feasible level of upgrade could you possibly be offering me to necessitate me upgrading my service? Will your upgrade fan me with a giant palm frond and feed me pineapple? Then I don't want it.

Usually I ignore the messages and it flips me one of those sad-face smiley icons - the ever so subtle passive-aggressive message being, "It's ok if we worked really hard upgrading the service and making it pretty and didn't sleep for like...two weeks, or see our wives, or get to go to our kids' play, but we don't mind if you don't want use it!" and despite the fact, no programmer working for AOL could possibly have a wife, it makes me want to pummel something with wanton abandon.

This latest upgrade, however, is just trying to make me homicidal by giving me no option. The only option is "uprade now" or "x" out the little exit box, which only makes it pop up again ten minutes later. Fuckers. And what's up with this Plaxo business? Stop trying to give me software I don't want. What in the name of God is Plaxo FOR anyway? I'll be damned if I can figure it out and if I can't figure it out why would I want it?