Omaha.com brings us the wonderful story of the man who thought FREE AOL meant FREE PHONE USAGE, too. Excerpt from the article:

“Thompson signed up for the service online. To find an AOL number to make the Internet connection, he typed his area code, 308, into the sign-up form. Several numbers popped up, none of them in McCook. He chose 865-6001 in Kearney, 100 miles away.

“Normally, he knew, that would be a long-distance call. But free means free, he figured, and AOL must have a deal with the phone company to carry dial-up connections.

Okay, stop. At a minimum, any responsible party might have, I don’t know, asked their long-distance carrier to verify that? In order to, you know, be SURE that $916 phone bill didn’t occur?

This, however, is what takes the cake:

“Lance Harke is a Miami lawyer who has taken AOL to federal court in a class-action lawsuit that contends AOL does not do enough to warn customers.”

No disrespect to the AOLers among us (they’re not all stupid, I promise) but people like Terry Thompson give AOLers a bad rep all over the internet. Then we follow it up with people like Mr. Lance Harke, who demonstrate to the rest of the free world that Americans (like me) are litigation-happy irresponible slugs. Don’t like the consequences of your AOL trial? Find ways to lay blame on the entertainers, and sue the crap outta them. That’ll teach THEM to provide me something to do.

I don’t even LIKE AOL and people like these two are forcing me to defend them. Not to mention Patricia Colclasure of Shawnee, KS, who let her daughter run up $3,190. She’s suing AOL too, cause she couldn’t be bothered to take an interest in her daughter’s extracurricular activity.

Oh, and they’re claiming that AOL automatically configures a long-distance (or toll) backup if the “local” number selected is busy — and having toyed with AOL since version 3.0, I can tell you, that’s outright lies.

You see what you idiots make me do? I’m defending Steve Freaking Case!