A O Hell!

During an absolutely magnificent thunderstorm the other night God, in his infinite wisdom, decided to hurl a lightning bolt at my parent's wireless router. Hardly surprising - she was quite the tart that router, willing to drop her firewall at the slyest wink. Security? If it wasn't too much of an inconvenience. Never met an ethernet cable she wasn't willing to plug into her port. She deserved to be smitten (for she so often was).

Anyhoo, ever the dutiful son I attempted to resolve the situation. This is my story...

What should have been an easy job (get new router, plug in cables, go to lunch) turned into a nightmare because my parents, unfortunately, are AOL users. It is my opinion that America Online software is good for one thing: using the free disks as beverage coasters. It is a behemoth, a buggy morass which sweeps in and infects every last nether region of a user's hard drive with an insatiable, malevolent lunacy. There is no escaping the AOL. Once it gets a grimy little foothold the only chance of reprieve is to format and reinstall.

The process of removing the faulty router sent it all of a twitter. "How will I report to the network? How will I get my five minute updates? How dare you!" It manifested it's distress with a persistent pop-up demanding a dial-up connection. When I say persistent I mean per-sis-tent! Clicking cancel resulted in the same pop-up exactly 1 second later. Clicking close resulted in the same pop-up exactly 1 second later. Clicking connect sent it off trying to dial to a non-existent phone line. It would try that two or three times before wising up and demanding some other method of connecting. The only solution was to ignore it, although from time to time it would reassert itself anyways.

Eventually, resigned to the fact that it wasn't getting any love with the dial-up pop-up it started throwing a bunch of scans my way. Virus scan, security scan - made me log in to a couple of services by intimating that something bad would happen to me if I didn't. I was trying to run the install disk that came with the router but AOL had so much going on that everything was proceeding at a snails pace. Eventually it became clear that the only way to move forward was to begin hunting down AOL processes and kill them off one by one, since the program flatly refused to close when I gave it the "exit" command. This resulted in what basically amounted to a thirty minute game of whack-a-mole. Eventually, as the haze cleared, Port Magic (AOL's "all your bases are belong to us" program) "found" the router and attempted to commandeer it, forcing me to put a bullet in the back of it's head. Once AOL was successfully vanquished the router installation software magically revived, finding an internet connection that had eluded it during the dark ages when the crap software ruled it's domain.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. AOL drives you insane because you have no other option than to enter such a cycle hoping you can slip one past the software and get the desired results, in my case applying knowledge learned from 25 years of goofing around with computers. The only other solution I can think of is to actually read up on AOL, learn the software and this whole alternate reality of computer operation which just seems from my perspective to be sheer madness. I am frankly terrified by the prospect and I think only a "Timothy Leary of computer science" would give the notion an endorsement.