Bring me the head of ... AOL

I've been a bit of a grumpy old woman for some days now, not helped by the blatant lie told by a friend of mine by text on my birthday: 'The postal strike means you won't get your card on your birthday.' No dear, the fact that you didn't even post my card until the day after my birthday means I won't get my card on my birthday! Doh!

Anyway, I usually save any complaints I have to make until I'm feeling, well, grumpy, because that way I'm not put off by sob stories or excuses, so today was the day to call AOL and sort out why they are still charging me when I switched to Talk Talk six weeks ago.

All was going well and the customer service bod said she would reverse the payment that had gone out of my account in July.

'What about the payment that went out on 27 June?' I asked. 'Talk Talk took over my broadband provision on 26 June and have had confirmation from you that the switch took place.'

'Ah, but, your billing date is the 24th of each month,' she said.

'So you're charging me £30 for 2 days' service?'

'Well, our records show that you used the service for over 100 hours in those two days,' she said.

I smiled an evil smile and took a deep breath.

'I fail to see how I can have used the service for over 100 hours when there are only 48 hours in any two-day period,' I told her.

She didn't back down. 'That's what it says here.'

'But you do agree that there are only 24 hours in a day and, therefore, only 48 hours in 2 days?'

'Yeeees, but you must be on a network.'

No, I am not on a network, I told her, I have one computer, one connection - one protected connection so that no drive-by hacker could park outside my house and use my wireless connection. And even if someone had parked, unnoticed, outside my house for 2 days with a lap-top, that would still only be 96 hours between the invisible hacker and me.

I obviously wasn't going to get round the, 'But your billing date is the 24th of the month,' rhetoric, but I did get a cancellation number and confirmation that no further payments would be taken.

Thank goodness I won't have to have anything to do with AOL again. And thank goodness I wasn't on a pay-per-use contract with them - being charged 50 hours a day would have made using the internet a pretty expensive hobby!