For insomniacs everywhere
December 1st, 2004 by Sarin
Almost every college student comes across one night when they just can’t sleep. They’ll toss and turn all night ignoring the fact that the night before they got 12 hours of sleep and was only awake for a 10 hour day. This usually happens to most of us at either the beginning or end of a break (most recently Thanksgiving). But us imsomniacs are also pathological stalkers. We prey on others who are online and not idle. But today’s IMing community makes it so routine to just leave an away message but sit there unidle while the other half will ponder the question to IM or not to IM.
Say it’s a Sunday, you’ve slept in for 4 days straght and your body could think of anything but sleep for the moment. You decide to get up and bother your mind… at 2am while your roommate is fast asleep. You get on the computer and go through everybody’s away message. As you scroll down those 200 buddies you decide to start at the bottom again. By this point you know who’s sleeping and who’s idle.
Then one of your buddies goes unidle. You think, what are they doing up? His/her away message still says that they are sleeping, but that’s ok because yours is too. 15 minutes pass and they haven’t gone idle. A simple midnight run to the bathroom doesn’t last 5 minutes on your watch because you set your AIM settings to show idleness at 10.
Then you ponder the thought of IMing somebody at 2:30 on a school night. If you get no response, you’ll look stupid and feel dumb for trying to talk to somebody when obviously they should be sleeping. You then begin to assume dumb scenarios. You assume that their optical mouse is acting hella strange and the laser inside is bouncing off the wazoo (because you’ve seen it happen and you’re a total idiot for assuming one) and they’re not really idle because their mouse is just fucking up. If you do leave an IM, they will read your stupid IM in the morning when they do wake up and they’ll wonder why you haven’t talked to them in weeks, but a stupid IM is left for them one random morning that consists of “are you awake?”.
You also begin to assume that the other party is pondering the same exact question. To IM or not to IM. You wrestle with this scenario for the next half hour and you would kick yourself if you ever ran into that person the next day and then hear them complain how last night they couldn’t sleep. Because by that point you are reminded that last night you were a lonely imsomniac that didn’t have the balls to IM someone.
So here’s the stupid solution. The next feature I want incorporated in AIM is some type of knock-knock alert. How a knock-knock alert would work is you would knock on a buddy, and the buddy would see an alert on their screen as sort of a ‘knock’. The knock could also incorporate a message such as the usual “are you awake?”. The knock alert would last say 10 seconds, and if the user isn’t really there, the knock goes away and the user would never know it happened. That way there’s no shame in knocking someone at 2 in the morning when they if they never see it, they never have to know. It would be a great way to start a conversation even if someone has an away message up or not. It’s sort of like a conversation initiator. “Yo, I’m here to talk, IM me.” Less intrusive, more convenient.
But there’s also a catch. Knocking on someone and not responding back is a great way to piss someone off. Say you really don’t want to talk to someone. It’s 3am, you claim to be sleeping, but someone knocks you 3 times in a row and you don’t respond. That way, you know that you were there and ignored the other user. In the meantime the other user doesn’t know that he/she got ignored and thinks that yeah you really were in bed.
My crazy mind at work.
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Va, it’s too bad you never realized this awsome gift you have for writing really excellent articles on college life. You would have made an awsome addition to the TNH. Oh well, guess you can add it to the list of “college regrets.” By the way, I notice my comment streak is approaching 100. When I hit 100 I want lots of balloons to rain down upon me in celebration of my sad, sad achievement.
Hitting 100 is never a sad sad achievement. I remember a time when I thought 100 was a big number… and I kept going. Boo yah!
That’s a great idea, actually, the whole knocking thing. And so damn relevent to my honors research on IM.
Honors research, that’s sweet.
You can quote me then.