I have 2 sisters that have worked at AOL for a year now and were told today that Teleperformance bought out the building and all the employees. They were informed this morning they have jobs until December 16th of this year. Right before Christmas they loose their jobs with AOL. Merry Christmas AOL you SUCK.

Hopefully things are not going well for AOL.

Is my prediction for 2007.

As a former manager for AOL, I have to say that overall, AOL is fair in the packages for the type of jobs these are. A Tucson news station is saying it is a local Utah telemarketer that is buying the Ogden call center and will seek to keep the employees there. The hardest part will be the retention employees who made $30k to $50k a year. Those jobs and income are not the type that teleperformance will replace; more like $20 to $25k a year jobs. That and many of the retention employees do not have higher educational degrees or training that relate to marketable skills outside of telemarketing. That is the angle of the story that someone needs to reflect in a news story. Good luck to those employees up in Ogden.

I worked for AOL for about 18 months, which was about a year and a half too long. It was a bad atmosphere, the employees were treated poorly and I felt the company lacked ethics. They paid well, with great bonuses and stock options etc. I feel that they thought if they kept throwing money at employees, they wouldn't notice what a terrible company AOL is.

As a former trainer for Teleperformance I can say that life won't be any better under their watchful eye than it was as an AOL employee. TPUSA is probably one of the worst companies to work for in Utah. In my opinion they pay some of the poorest wages in Utah for the work they expect and they appear to me to have very little value for their employees. To them we are all just disposable assets that can be replaced at a moment's notice. If you work for AOL right now and thing that working for TPUSA will be any better, my suggestion is to run while you can. Things are about to get really sucky really quickly. And that is coming from someone who wasn't laid off from the company. I ran screaming from them after 3 years of employment as a trainer.

AOL does not own the call center!!! Everything is leased. So what is for sale?

I worked at the Ogden call center, September 1997 - may 1998. When I first started, it was great. The Internet was still mysterious, and being a computer geek was even more cool. The end for me came in the spring of 1998, when we, the WINDOWS DOS TECH SUPPORT queue was forced, upon pain of death, to read that stupid free gas script at the end of EACH call. I did that for a week. Made the customers mad. They screamed at me. They said, I called to get AOL fixed, not to buy stuff! So I stopped reading the silly junk. My coach, a fat, whale of a lady, initials D.B., ordered me to bring up my sales numbers, or, as she said, there would be.. consequences. Soon after this my cousin offered me a job at another ISP. In the middle of my shift at AOL one day, I finished a call, gathered my stuff, walked over to D.B.'s desk, dropped my ID on her desk and walked out. Greatest thing I ever did, up till then.