In LOOKING FOR MR. GOODFROG Karrie is on Uh-Oh-L.com. That's frog language for AOL. But Uh-Oh is right, because I've spent the last five days in AOL Hell!

My book came out a week ago. If ever I need my web site. it's now. I sat down Saturday to update, edit, list my events, and blog. And when I tried to pull up my web site, to check it all out, it wasn't there. I was told it was "not responding." What was it? A weird date?

I first found out it was "incommunicado" through two "potential" JDates. Logging onto that site, just for whatever... I received an IM from a guy in Pennsylvania who told me he wanted to come to the city to meet me and had tried e-mailing me through my web site but it wouldn't load up. I immediately alerted my webmaster, until I received an e-mail from a guy in California who said he didn't want to meet me, I lived too far away, but he wanted to say hi. And by the way, he liked my web site. Pennsylvania guy was on AOL and California guy was not.

A bunch of phone calls later I found out anyone with an AOL Internet connection could not get lauriegraff.com but everyone else could. Well, I had to get it fixed.

I don't think people should be sent to jail. I just think they should have to successfully communicate with someone from AOL. It would be hell enough to have to penetrate the prompts and the robotic voices and say the first three letters of their screen name, and "yes" and "repeat that" and keep doing it and doing it until they A) got a person on the phone, and B)got their issue fixed. Why bother to lock someone up? They can be in a much cheaper hell spending days on the phone repeating themselves, talking to no one, and straining to understand the manual speak from someone with an impossible accent from wherever their unsolvable problem had been outsourced.

When it doubt, cry. So I did. To my hosting people. Globat. And after four days, count them, four, my tears got my problem escalated to a tier-two tech support guy who actually "got it." Then he got a friend who had a friend who once worked for AOL and knew someone in the Network Operations Center who found out that for whatever reason, AOL had blocked an entire server that affected fifty web sites. This guy said it was a really big problem, but I was the only one who noticed. Story of my life!

Anyway, it got fixed today. Five days later. The guy totally helped me, and the guy was also very nice. He's just 21 and clearly a tech genius. I was giving him the AOL lowdown just minutes before I had a radio interview for my book. He thought that was cool and timed his calls around it. And when he called back he wanted to know just who Mr. Goodfrog was. No one who works for AOL, that's for sure. Think they are still at toad status.

I wrote him a glowing review and sent it to his boss. So if you have AOL and you are reading this you have him to thank! And if you don't have it, well... I shall say no more.