AOL User Who Downloaded 47,000 Songs On Dial-Up In 1999 Finally Hears ‘Sorry For The Hold Music’
ARLINGTON, VA — In what experts are calling “the longest customer service hold time in human history,” local man and eternal optimist Kevin Schmidt, 42, has finally reached the end of a 26-year-long AOL dial-up download queue, only to be greeted by a screeching modem noise and a single, haunting email: “Thanks for your patience. We’ve upgraded to fiber. You’re 10 years too late.”
Schmidt, who still uses the email address “xXx_Shadow_Warrior_69_xXx@aol.com” as his primary contact, set 47,000 songs to download on a single, fateful evening in November 1999. He was trying to get the entire discography of Limp Bizkit, a single Weird Al song, and 46,999 other MP3s that were definitely not legally acquired from Napster, LimeWire, or a third-party FTP server hosted in someone’s basement.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Schmidt told reporters from his mom’s basement, which still has a “No Girls Allowed” sign on the door. “I clicked ‘Download All,’ heard that glorious screeching handshake sound, and then my mom picked up the phone to call her friend Karen. I knew I was in for a wait. I just didn’t think the wait would be longer than the entire lifespan of the Soviet Union.”
For context, when Schmidt initiated this download, the PlayStation 2 wasn’t out yet, Wikipedia didn’t exist, and people still thought “The Phantom Menace” was going to be good. The estimated download time for a single 3MB MP3 file on a 56k modem was roughly 45 minutes, assuming no one in the house picked up the phone, a solar flare didn’t wipe out the signal, and the gods of digital chaos were feeling merciful.
“I did the math,” Schmidt said, holding up a greasy napkin covered in hieroglyphic-level scribbles. “47,000 songs at an average of 4 MB each. That’s 188,000 MB. At 5 KB per second, you’re looking at about 1,210 days of continuous, uninterrupted download time if you somehow avoided every single dropped connection. But I didn’t account for the fact that my family had a life. Or that my sister would want to use the internet for homework. Or that every time a truck drove by, the line would disconnect.”
The download finally completed at 3:47 AM on a Tuesday. Schmidt, who had fallen asleep waiting, was jolted awake by the sound of a single, triumphant “You’ve Got Mail!” — only to find that the queue had been paused for 24 years due to a “network timeout error” that AOL’s customer service, reached via a separate 12-year hold, had only just resolved.
“The first song that finished was ‘Nookie’ by Limp Bizkit,” Schmidt said, wiping a single tear from his cheek. “I felt… something. Was it nostalgia? Was it tinnitus from the modem noise? I don’t know. But I also got an email from AOL apologizing for the hold time and offering me a free trial of AOL 9.0 VR. I didn’t even know that was a thing.”
The AOL spokesperson, reached via a time-traveling fax machine, issued a statement: “We at AOL are thrilled to finally deliver Mr. Schmidt’s content. We apologize for the delay, but we were busy maintaining our dial-up network for the 12 people in rural Montana who still think broadband is a communist plot. As a goodwill gesture, we are offering Mr. Schmidt a free AOL CD-ROM featuring 1000 hours of internet access, valid through December 2002.”
The internet, naturally, has been less than sympathetic. Reddit’s r/techsupportgore has already crowned Schmidt the “Patron Saint of Buffering,” with top comments reading:
- “Bro really thought he could download the entire history of nu-metal on a connection slower than a sloth on Xanax.”
- “AITA for laughing at the guy who waited 26 years for a Limp Bizkit album? NTA. He did this to himself.”
- “This is the most boomer energy I’ve ever seen from a millennial. My guy downloaded a virus that took 26 years to install.”
Schmidt’s therapist, Dr. Linda Chen, has expressed concern. “Kevin displays classic symptoms of ‘90s-era tech trauma. He still flinches when he hears a landline ring. He insists on printing every email. And he has a shrine to the Clippy paperclip that I cannot legally discuss.”
When asked if the 47,000 songs were even worth it, Schmidt opened the file folder. Of the 47,000 files, 42,000 were corrupted, 3,000 were mislabeled as “Backstreet Boys – I Want It That Way” but were actually just static noise, and the remaining 2,000 were a single track: “What’s New Pussycat?” by Tom Jones, repeated on a loop.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Schmidt said. “But I do know one thing. I’m going to start downloading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in real-time. It’s only 11 hours of footage. With my luck, I’ll get the extended edition in 2089.”
Final Thoughts
Having covered the rise and fall of digital empires, I’d argue that AOL’s real legacy isn’t the screeching modem or the millions of CD-ROMs—it’s the cautionary tale of confusing a captive audience with genuine loyalty. The company owned the on-ramp to the internet, but it failed to grasp that the destination would soon be a web without walls, leaving it stranded when the tollbooth became obsolete. AOL didn’t just miss the broadband boat; it taught every subsequent tech giant that dominance in one era is often just a prelude to irrelevance in the next.