I'm one of those guys who clung superstitiously to Internet Explorer for months after it had been demonstrated to me that Firefox was superior in every way. Change makes me uncomfortable. As such, I've also stuck with AOL Instant Messenger since using AOL back in the early 90s. I knew there were superior alternatives out there, but I continued to cower in the shadow of AIM's familiar and increasingly annoying interface.

Until today. Today AIM took a running leap from the cliffs of insanity into the ocean of batshit blithering madness.

I'd refused AIM's most recent updates even though doing so presents you with a sadface system message that makes you feel like you've let the program down.

My version still ran ads at the top of the buddy list, which was fine because I just ignored them. For years I've ignored them, as the program grew increasingly indignant, sulking at the top right of my screen. "Ignore my targeted online dating ads, will he?" it said, clenching its little C++ fists. "I'll show him!" And today it did. It showed me good.

I had an IE window open, because I have to do this when I'm working on a Web page to make sure IE's childish grasp of CSS hasn't rendered my page so it looks like it was hit by a bus. I was minimizing AIM as it started to load a new ad, and I guess it got stuck in some retarded loop, constantly trying to load this ad. What resulted was this barrage of shit:

IE windows flooded my desktop, all pointing to the same stupid AIM ad. As soon as I realized that AIM was trying to kill me, I hit ctrl+alt+delete, thinking I'd terminate aim.exe and iexplore.exe. But it was too late. I didn't take a final tally because I was too busy being furious, but about 50 of the windows had launched, and I guess that was the upper limit of what my system could tolerate. Closing any of them would just spawn however many windows I had closed. I couldn't open the task manager (or anything else for that matter). I couldn't even right click on things.

Eventually I just opened one of the windows and held down alt+F4. It turned into an embarrassing minigame to reclaim my desktop; I'd have to click on the spawning windows while holding the close function, but if I missed any they'd all respawn within a second. After some fine-tuning of my technique, this approach worked long enough for me to terminate everything. I installed Trillian ten minutes later, and I am never using AIM again.

So good job, AOL! I've been one of your most mindlessly dedicated users, but then you wrecked my shit with your awful coding. I shudder to think what your newer versions--which are like 60% ads--would have done to me. Perhaps I would have doubled over in pain and coughed out some Cialis popups onto the floor.

I am advertising Trillian for free because it is not AIM.