[JA] $10 Customer
- From: jim.henderson@xxxxxxxx
- To: juno_accmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 23:45:06 -0400
I sold a used P-350 to the mother of my niece's classmate last year.
Tuesday she called for an emergency. She and her housemate had moved the
computer, and a part had fallen off. Besides, the computer was very
slow, especially her free Juno Web.
Thursday I bicycled to Brooklyn and found that the serial mouse port had
come unscrewed and fallen inside the case. Easy enough; those port
screws were a lousy feature of the RS-232 standard thirty years ago and
they remain a lousy feature. For speed I looked for viruses,
insufficient disk space, fragmentation and overloaded RAM. Found
nothing. Well, fragmentation was high but it wasn't the problem.
Juno mail worked fine but Web was another matter. It kept disconnecting
when she clicked from one page to another, sitting around for minutes
before showing a "can't find page" page or asking whether she wanted AOL
to connect.
A bit of discussion revealed that the housemate is a heavier Web user
than the family, browsing a few days most weeks for a couple hours. Aha,
says I, this probably means your allowance is used up. Darn it, Juno
ought to tell you that, but they don't. They just cut you off and leave
you hanging, not knowing if the computer is broken or what. Would the
Web service come back if we didn't use it for a week or two and used it
lightly after that? Probably, says I.
It turns out the housemate will return to college in the mountains this
month, so Web usage will again be light. On the other hand, the ten year
old will start school and it will be good for her to have Web any time
she wants.
AOL? Heaven forfend. Juno pay? There are $5, $10 and $40 plans.
Cheapest doesn't do much; it's something of a trap to get you to pay lots
more per additional hour if you use more than a very few hours. $40 is
DSL, almost a hundred times faster than your modem, great for serious
Wellheads. $10 is a happy medium, lots of hours, fewer ads, fewer
mysterious disconnects. In case of any problems, theoretically there is
a chance to talk to somebody at Juno on the phone, who theoretically
might not be an idiot.
AT&T Worldcom has a similar price, and so do a few others. No, that
would mean changing address. No, you can continue to use free Juno for
mail, and use any paid provider for Web. Well, she wants Juno. Fine; I
can't call that a bad decision; just wanted to offer alternatives. How
to sign up? Click on the ad. So, she typed in the stuff from her credit
card, and later got E-mail confirming. I hope to hear that her service
is working well.
Darn idiots at Juno; they could easily have got her, without my help.
Instead they just kept cutting her off. No Web page came to say her Juno
hours had run out; just a generic one to say she couldn't reach what she
had clicked for. She kept getting Juno ads by mail, but they didn't say
she had used up her hours, and could get more by paying. As far as she
could see the computer was broken or Juno was broken. Those people
aren't paying attention to their job; they needed me to explain the
benefits of paying.
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