As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a software developer during my day job, and I read a lot of related blogs. Like the blog for today’s subject (whose post title I blatantly stole), I will occasionally find one that fits Second Life well enough that I want to bring it to SL enthusiasts attention despite the fact that there’s not always a lot of crossover in the target audiences.
Signal vs Noise, the blog for web development superstars 37signals, has a wonderful post today about the language that service providers invariably seem to use when things go bad.
On top of the daily service outages and database issues that we’ve all been experiencing, I have not been able to reliably and consistently get into Second Life for weeks, and I’ve been so intensely frustrated that this section of the aforementioned post really struck a sympathetic chord with me:
“Any inconvenience”
First of all, if I depend on a service and can’t get to it, it’s not an inconvenience. It might bloody very well be a full-on crisis. An inconvenience is when I can’t get my flavor of milkshake at Potbelly’s or if there’s line at the grocery store. This ain’t that.Using the word “any” makes it even worse. It’s implying that you don’t really care what bucket my frustrations fit in. Every feeling I have about this will apparently fit the “inconvenience” header. Wrong.
Please take the time to visit the 37signals blog post for the rest of the rant, it’s well worth it 
One Comment
lol a good read… thanks for the link. i always thought LL are very bad when it comes to admitting problems and it takes them like forever to announce a warning on their grid status page. they don’t even apologize, they only say stuff like “Most In world services are at reduced functionality at the moment.” which would imply that some things still work and even the affected functions still work in a way when simply nothing works at all and all you can do is stand around and chat which can be quite good if you are with nice people.
also what makes me wonder is when i have a look at critical issues on the jira it is frightening to see that they really don’t feel inclined to keep up a dialog with the community, there are some reported showstoppers where the last comment from a linden is 3 or more months old. the only explanation i can find is that they are a business who concentrates on quantity, satisfying the big mass of people who shop and party and keeping those as customers is more important to them than providing a functional base for the relatively small part of a community which contributes with quality content to keep this (their!, LL’s!) place interesting. they are so proud of the numbers of residents and of how many people log in but they don’t know that those are only the millions of alts of half a dozen c:si users…/hehe