When AOL said, ‘If you leave me I’ll do something crazy’

When Vincent Ferrari, 30, of the Bronx, called AOL to cancel his membership last month, it took him a total of 21 minutes, including the time spent on an automated sequence at the beginning and some initial waiting in a queue. He recorded the five minutes of interaction with the AOL customer service representative and, a week later, posted the audio file on his blog.

Shortly thereafter, those five minutes became the online equivalent of a top-of-the-charts single.

To listen as Ferrari tries to cancel his membership is to join him in a wild, horrifying descent into customer-service hell. The AOL representative, self-identified as John, sounds like a native English speaker; he refuses to comply when Ferrari asks, demands and finally pleads—over and over again—to close his account.

‘‘By my count, he used the word ‘cancel’ 21 times,’’ said Nicholas J. Graham, an AOL vice-president and spokesman. ‘‘That’s not counting the I-don’t-need-it, I-don’t-want-it and I-don’t-use-it. Add the other inferences, it’s probably closer to 30.’’ Graham, almost needless to say, was sharply critical of John’s lack of responsiveness.

Some people who posted comments on the Web about the recording—about 20% of them, in Ferrari’s estimation—found it so incredible that they declared it a hoax. But Graham said the call’s authenticity had been internally verified, and he sent Ferrari a letter of apology. He said John was no longer with the company.

If John’s behavior had been that of a person in the grip of genuine pathological madness, the recording of the call would not have drawn the attention of so many people, nor would it have been replayed on national television and radio programs. What one hears in John is an actor performing clumsily, to be sure, but working with a script provided by his employer that confuses ‘‘customer service’’ with ‘‘sales.’’

During his travail, Ferrari does his best to nudge John away from the script: ‘‘When I say, ‘Cancel the account,’ I don’t mean, ‘Figure out how to help me keep it.’ I mean, ‘Cancel the account.’’’

People who left online comments about Ferrari’s AOL call expressed delight in seeing public exposure of an AOL experience similar to their own. ‘‘The same thing happened to me’’ is a refrain among the posts. Before the advent of the Web, an encounter with inept customer service was ours to bear alone, with little recourse.

Now, Ferrari can post on the Web a digital ‘‘documentary’’ that recorded his experience, and news-sniffing hounds do the rest.

–RANDALL STROSS