Month: February 2010

For reasons that I totally don’t understand, many companies choose Skype as a standard communication application.  I’d understood such a decision if they were using voice or video calls.  But they don’t.  Chat only.  And pretty much everyone knows how horrible Skype is for chats.  It’s slow, often losing offline messages, its history management is horrible, etc, etc, etc.  But today’s post is not about that.

It’s about parallel universes.  And how Skype is the master of them.  Consider my example from this morning.   I came to work, logged in to Skype, saw who is online and started chatting with one of the co-workers.  In the meantime, a guy next to me was doing exactly the same thing – came in, logged in to Skype, saw who is online, and started chatting with another co-worker.  But the interesting bit was that we couldn’t see each other online.  If we tried to send messages or files to each other, they’d fail complaining that the other party is offline.  The same was true for those co-workers with who we were chatting, they couldn’t see the other half of the office, which was online, chatting, and couldn’t see the first half of the office.

Is there any other explanation except that Skype managed to create at least two separate, parallel universes and signed in half of our office into one universe, and the second half of the office into another universe?  I can’t think of one…