This space was originally going to be filled with a nice fun rant about Earthlink. Instead, it's filled with a story of bad times with a surprise ending. Still about Earthlink, though.

You see, I've been a long-time (six year) user of Mindspring. A few years ago, Earthlink bought Mindspring, but they let me keep my service plan. $26.95 for dialup access plus extra email boxes and aliases.

I noticed last month that Earthlink had sweetened their $21.95 plan to where it very nearly covered everything that my $26.95 plan did, so I figured it was high time to save myself five dollars. I logged in, made the switch, and the return message informed me that I would be billed $21.95 on the next invoice. Fantastic.

I got the invoice on Saturday. It was for $56.60.

Stunned, I looked it over to figure out what went wrong. Turned out that while my old plan included aliases, the new one did not. (Earthlink flat out doesn't offer them anymore.) So they billed me $4.95 each for the five that I had. Oh, and I had two mailboxes too many, also $4.95 each. My attempt to save five bucks had cost me $34.65.

I deleted the offending items and very calmly logged into their Support Chat thingy. There, I dealt with a seemingly nice guy who gave me a very polite runaround. Initially, he told me I was stuck with the aliases. Upon further pushing, he told me he would "credit" my account for the entire $34.65, but flatly refused to give me a refund. (In fairness, there is a specific reason I wanted the refund. More later.) Dismayed, I asked him who else I could talk to, and he gave me Earthlink's Customer Service phone number.

Okay, I hate using the phone. I love having the time to formulate words and ideas, and that's not something I do that well spontaneously. When I'm having to get my point across over the phone, I invariably goof up and try to push an argument that just makes things worse.

After poking through Google, I notice that people don't generally have good things to say about Earthlink's Customer Service. Then again, that might be because they wanted something semi-unreasonable and didn't get it. (Then again, you could argue that this whole thing started because I wasn't detail-oriented enough.)

Anyway, I'm expecting the worst. Figuring Saturday night is not the best time to call Customer Service, I decide to make the call Monday afternoon. On the bright side, this gives me plenty of time to formulate a "convincing" argument. (You know, rather than those "blistering idiot" ones I come up with so often.)

So, Monday afternoon, I make the call. I spend ten minutes listening to repetitive jumbles about "amazing Earthlink services". Hey, did you know you can save two bucks by switching to Sprint? Thanks for the tip.

A guy answers the phone and asks me about my problem. I give him my well-rehearsed spiel. He looks through my account, and I hear him counting the boxes and aliases. He comes up with the same total, $34.65. He offers to credit my account. I'm back where I was on Saturday.

So I tell him point blank that I'd really love a refund. Without hesistation, he tells me he'd be happy to do so. Wow, seriously?

Needless to say, I was stunned. I spent an hour fighting with the Support Chat guy on Saturday ("we don't usually give refunds to active accounts" - yeah, and I'm sure you don't usually hit your long-time customers with unexpected charges), and this guy fixes the whole situation in under five minutes.

So this rant kinda got nipped in the bud. I actually called Customer Service and got what I was hoping for, without having to get snooty, angry, and throwing a fit. (That's an extra surprise, granted that I'm just not a big enough a-hole to get into a shouting match with a Customer Service rep, meaning that I don't usually get what I want.)

I'm wondering how miffed they're going to be when I call later this month to cancel my account.

Um, yep, that's the reason I wanted the refund. Now that I've got this webspace, the only thing I use the Mindspring account for is email, and I don't really need that granted that I have several other options for email. If I let them keep the credit, the money would be theirs to keep when I cancelled.

I really can't wait for that phone call. I've heard that cancelling an account with an ISP can be worse than pulling teeth. And I had one really seriously fun time pulling teeth when I was 15. So this should be good.