downed email

So my webmail company is currently down — for maybe the past hour — and I just visited their status blog to see when it would be back up, and was slammed with several PAGES of vitriol from people who were unhappy with this situation and were sayign the most awful and cruel things to the poor tech guy who was up at 2:23 a.m. in Australia trying to fix it.

You could tell he was trying to work, but had to keep going back and soothing the hurt feelings of people who were all up in arms and etc. etc…

It reminded me a lot of another online forum where people seem to forget that the bile they are spewing actually reaches a person, a person who is doing everything in their power to make the situation better, a person who is doing it at 2:23 a.m. in the morning, who is doing it maybe even not as their job, but as a volunteer position, and who would be able to do it a lot more quickly an efficiently if everyone would just shut the fuck up for a second.

I love my online world. But I don’t see people acting this way in real life. There are certain cultural taboos that help prevent us from failing to treat other human beings like human beings when we are face to face with them. When you are in a restaurant, and there’s that asshole guy at the next table who is treating his waitress like a slave? Notice how everyone else in the restaurant thinks he’s the bad guy? Notice how, when you’re getting slow service, you don’t stand up in the middle of the restaurant and proclaim in front of everyone about how SHAMEFUL, SHAMEFUL it is, and how your waitress is the DEVIL, and how you think you should all, simultaneously, stand up and pound out of the restaurant, picket them, report them to the better business bureau, etc. No, you don’t. You just whisper to your dinner mates that this place is a disaster, choose not to go back, and stiff the girl on her tip. (And that’s a girl whose single and sole job is to get your food. She’s not volunteering to get your food on her coffee break from her real job as a nurse at the clinic across the street.)

I don’t think those safeguards exist online. This Aussie tech guy? He’s not a person to them. He’s a machine in a cog. And the machine is broken, so they are going to heap all of their hatred and anger and frustration on this one cog, this one cog that’s *not* broken, that’s doing everything it can to fix the other cogs. They’re going to actually KEEP him from doing that job, and call him horrible names, and in general redirect their own frustration onto him.

Look, I know email is important to your business. It’s important to my business. Even now, I could be getting an email from my agent saying that Steven Spielberg called and Secret Society Girl is a go. But if an hour or so goes by and I don’t find that out, well, that’s just one less case of champagne, now isn’t it? If a day goes by (as it did during hte New York blackout a few years ago) yeah, I’m going to start getting pissed. But just chill out. Go find something else to do with your free hour other than cyber-abusing the poor tech guy.

Sheesh.