I still keep in touch with several of my good friends from college. They are all somewhat geeky people, so our primary means of communication, outside of blogging, is via instant messaging services. I, being the person least likely to communicate by other means, has been running GAIM or a multiclient chat program for several years. The problem is that my friends all demand to use one particular client or another. I’ve got screen names on nearly every service under GAIM, and I use each service to talk to only one or two of my friends. If GAIM didn’t support chatting with many services at once, I’d be stuck running three or four messengers if I wanted to talk to all of my friends at any one time.
I’ve slowly started getting my friends to use interoperable services to spare the amount of copying and pasting I need to do between friends that are chatting with me at the same time, but have to way to talk to each other due to their clients not working together. Due to snow storms in the United States, they had days off work. (So lucky!)
Since they weren’t at work, where most of their chatting transpires (productivity, thy fate is doomed), my friends lacked their complete list of contacts. This means I was going back and forth between them, cutting and pasting conversations between them. Ironically, most of the conversations today were about trying to get their different clients working together.
A: "What’s his screen name again?"
Me: "What’s your screen name?"
B: "Oh, my screen name is this, what’s his?"
Me: "Here is his screen name, what is yours."
And so on…
Other than chatting about not being able to chat with each other, and the snowy weather, not much got accomplished, but I was tremendously busy relaying messages across the globe to keep my friends in touch.
I’ve thought of solutions. Why don’t I use IRC to create a channel we could all use to talk together? I took me 6 years to get these guys chatting regularly on simple, relatively easy to use IM programs. While some of them are tech savvy enough to use the internet and blog, something like Internet Relay Chat isn’t going to happen any time soon. I count myself lucky that I can now call them from Skype and forgo the entire chat fiasco if I so chose. They’d be content with emails if I didn’t hassle them constantly to be online for someone to entertain me after work. We are all codependent time wasters.
