Is that your final answer?

John Grogan’s spent most of the second half of 2004 writing about the legislative pay raises in his Inquirer column. (There was a sprinkling of Catholic church sex abuse scandal thrown in for good measure.)

Now that the pay raise has been rescinded, and we’ve had to purchase new calendars, Grogan has turned his attention to a much more pressing issure: those free AOL trial CDs.

No, really. Grogan spotted two AOL CDs he had already thrown out and decides to take action; he tries to return them, wasting the time of several postal clerks — but, surprise, they can’t be returned with the bulk rate AOL uses. Then he calls up AOL a few times and thinks about sending them himself, but doesn’t want to spend the money to do so. And, finally, he gets through to a friendly call service rep in somewhere not in America and gets off the AOL mailing list.

Okay, forget that this is a column that people would have said was stale if Dave Barry wrote about it in 1997. (He probably did have, actually, but there’s not enough time to check his 47,000 books to find out.) But who even gets AOL CDs anymore? I didn’t even know AOL had the money to send out free trial CDs to every human being in America at this point. Most of us have moved past the idea that “A/S/L” is an exciting form of communication — now people just say “fuck u” or something of the sort — and we’ve moved on.

At least John Grogan has taught us today that AOL still exists, which is something I wasn’t quite sure about until this morning. Get ready for his exciting column about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? early next week.

John Grogan | You’ve got spam: AOL’s trial CDs [Inky]