Chat Summary- Thursday, June 21, 2001

Wow, this chat was jinxed from the beginning! Since there were so many problems (the main one being the fact that the chat server was down!), there ended up being no chat at all, just a frenzy of a few of us migrating from chat room to chat room, wasting time. Although we did chat, it was nothing like the last one, and it would be boring to read anyway. So instead of a transcript, a summary from my point of view is posted instead.

It was 5:10 PM and I was scurrying to finish checking my email in order to join the MNM Chat that had already started. After that was done, I clicked quickly onto my website, and then on the chat link. After one too many seconds of waiting, the page that finally came up was totally white and had this message:

"The page cannot be displayed- The page you are looking for is currently unavailable..." and on and on and on about Microsoft, and connections, and junk. Anyway, I was very worried, but I just thought to myself, "Oh, it's probably my stupid browser, again." I signed off and then signed back on, went back to my chat, and I still got that message! By now, I was steamed. Just to confirm one more time if it was me or the server, I went to Bravenet's main site and I got the same message! "Aaahhh, Bravenet, you $^$#^$!!!!!" I was yelling at my monitor. Weeks and weeks of preparation to make this chat better organized than the first one all went down the drain. Plus, I had to leave this church party early just to make it to the chat on time!

Knowing that I had dozens of visitors that were wondering what the heave was going on, I signed onto AIM, and immediately began questioning my friends, Nate, Dinko, Magma Mario, and Cocoa Bean. They said they couldn't get into the chat either. For awhile, we just freaked out and finally we decided to all go into an AOL chat room and have our chat there.

More problems arose. Cocoa Bean and Magma Mario couldn't get in the chat room because their software didn't support it for some reason. Instant messages were flying back and forth demanding to know what's going on and cursing at Bravenet for ruining everything for us. Dinko then suggested that we all go to his chat room at his site. I agreed, but I was so busy answering questions from multiple IMs that I never got to telling him so. I was also still trying to test my chat room to see if it worked. At one point, I actually got into my chat room on my site, and told everyone. But it turned out no one else still couldn't get in. The chat room was still broken somehow. Then, to further confirm that fact, my own chat room kicked me out. After notifying everybody else of Dinko's suggestion, Cocoa Bean, Magma Mario, and I all migrated over to Dinko's chat room. But Dinko and Nate weren't even there, but I was still talking to them on IM.

We were all finally semi-satisfied with our new haven to chat, but before I could even get a minute of conversation into the new chat, my mom was telling me that we needed to buy a card for my cousin. She was having a very important religious celebration, one that I couldn't miss, that was going to start at 7:00. By now, it was already 6:15. If we wanted to get all dressed up, get a card, and then make it to the church on time, I'd have to leave right that second. Reluctantly, I said goodbye to everyone and hurriedly got offline, still frustrated of the unsuccessfulness of this chat.

Afterword: "If at first you don't succeed, try again." Okay, we just have to have more chats. Just because it was rained down on this time, doesn't mean we can't try again! Thus, we will have a 2nd MNM Chat, The Sequel, sometime late next month. I will announce it on my site. I'm also considering creating a backup chat (on a different server of course!) just in case this happens again. But geez, it's hard to find a good chat server that you can integrate on your site, these days! But that's a whole different story.