Customer service for addicts
For the last four hours or so, Yahoo! Messenger has been down. I've been a loyal user for the last six years, and I wish Yahoo! was saying something about this. What's wrong? When will the outage be over?
Because Yahoo! isn't saying anything, frustrated users have taken to Yahoo! Answers. There's a great story here. Yahoo! gives people points for answering posted questions. It's not clear to me what the points are for, but that doesn't matter. People are out there diligently answering questions from other people and racking up points.
And, boy, are there a lot of questions to answer. I went back and looked, and it seems that there are four or five questions a minute pouring in from Yahoo! Messenger addicts all over the world. They all want to know what's wrong, and there's no saying what's wrong. So the point-gatherers keep saying they don't know. It's pretty good-humored most of the time, but there have been some ugly moments.
Someone wants to talk to his buddy in Iraq. Someone's losing money by the minute. Someone feels completely cut off. Someone's mail is blocked. Someone's really mad that Yahoo! isn't saying anything (actually, lots of someones are mad about this). Someone thinks that maybe Yahoo! loaded too many features into Messenger. Or screwed up with the merge with MSN. Or it's too hot. Or maybe Yahoo! just wants everyone to switch IM clients.
There have been moments of comic relief. “I just want everyone to know that my husband did it,” one woman said. “It's Bush and Cheney,” someone else said. “Who else is taking advantage of all these points?” someone wanted to know. Lots of responses to that one. “What's an avatar and who made up that word?” runs another question. Since everything has to be formed as a question, one person asks: “Would it kill people to read the board and see that their question has been asked 500 times?”
In fact, the board has become a kind of buddy list for addicts, all of them sailing through the hours pounding at the keys and wishing that Messenger would come back up. ”Hey, we're chatting!” one guy says. ”Who needs Messenger?”
Yahoo!? Are you out there? You may want to get these people back into the fold. They're feeling pretty disloyal at the moment.
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