Screw You, Too, TLA

I’ve got a story of scariness for you. Do Not Use Text-Link-Ads. This may seem unprofessional, to blast them like this – and it is – but I know that a lot of folks have signed up for Pay Per Post, BangGraphix and other services after seeing them here on Beautiful Sin and I don’t want my visitors to get screwed.

I had joined Text Link Ads awhile back to generate some extra income, and they did their job – I had one link on this site for awhile that generated about $7.50 a month, which was nice, but for reasons that are between myself and my host Beautiful Sin may have to go offline for maintenance for awhile, which is a matter in which I have no choice. Well, I contacted TLA to let them know about it, and they removed my site from the program – which is fine, if that’s policty – but the person who got back to me about it was rude as hell. He acted like I chose to take my website down just to piss him off, and explained that they don’t want sites like mine that can’t be online everyday, they don’t work with them. “We do not want to work with sites that cannot stay online. It’s just as simple as that.”

Apparently my website problems, that cost ME money, by the way, make them look bad because I had no other choice then to ask them for some time for my site maintenance. I don’t ever plan on using them again, even if it turns out my site’s OK, and it’s not worth $7.50 to be treated like scum when I was doing my best to be as nice about it as possible. It’s not OK to treat people like that, it’s not OK to show someone little or no respect. He could have just said that he couldn’t remove my site because of the contact, and I would have said “OK, I’ll temporarily move it to a new server during the maintenance.”, or he could have said “We can remove you this time, but it’s generally against our policy to do this because it breaks contract with our advertiser.” or something like that, which isn’t fun but at least it’s not rude.

First of all, since when is it just the advertiser that needs to be treated kindly? Is it too much to ask for even a few kind words? Seriously? I work in customer support, if I had ever talked to a customer like that I would be docked if not fired on the spot, that’s just irresponsible.

Actually, I may move the site to a new server ( temporarily ) anyway, while the maintenance is being performed, but I’d still never go back to TLA. I strongly suggest they develop some decent support or people skills.

BEFORE YOU COMMENT: Please understand that, though I'm all for free speech, I'm also busy and downright mean. Because of this I will not tolerate offensive, inappropriate or hateful comments. I'll warn you and delete the offensive part, but if you repeat the offense I'll probably ban you from the domain. I'm sorry, but I just don't have time for spam, racism, and so on and so on. Just to note: What I find offensive? Is what we'll call offensive, this being my blog and all. ;)