Chitchat

There are some chat applications available, like Office Communicator. Also Skype, Gmail and Facebook for instance offer chat services. So this topic is familiar to many of us already.

When I use the chat, I can see an informative string of text saying "X is writing" or something alike. That means I'm about to get a reply from Mr/Mrs. X soon. Sometimes the info text is there and then it suddenly disappears. No reply. Then the info re-appears there, only to disappear again. Finally I get a short reply, like "Ok". Sometimes there won't be any reply at all. I wonder what happens. Was the fellow I was chatting with erasing his text, then re-wrote it, erased again and in the end wrote 'ok' and pressed 'send' button (hitting the enter key also does that usually)? And sometimes he cleared his text and didn't send anything? Or is the informative text giving erroneous information? Can it be trusted anymore?

This is not the end of the world, but small things like this start to aggravate after a while. Chat is a good tool for many purposes - both at work and when you want to be a prick with your friends. I do them both, in a positive sense if it only is possible. I'd like to think it is.