You actually made me lol in this airport thank you

Sent a relatively new and somewhat nervous co-worker a “grandpasimpsonleave.gif” responding to the 8 billionth mutual emergency of the day followed immediately by “I kid, I kid, we’ll fix it! 😉 [Relevant follow up question]?”

Guess which of those two messages was the last one unaffected by the outage? Yep. I got to watch her devolve into a panic as her messages reached me and my responses didn’t get sent to her, and THEN delivered in the worst order/selection possible. Felt like the more critical the message, the less likely to send.

And! She’s on the other side of the continent and all her location’s phones are through teams also! And it was time sensitive.

Rough Friday.

Also they were HORRIFICALLY unreliable, to the point where my mechanic’s actual quote was “Folks, I’m not in the habit of talking myself out of a $10,000 paycheck, but this car is not worth it.” 30 minutes before we walked in his door it was working fine, by the time he went to drive it to the bay it wouldn’t start, and never did again.

It wasn’t even paid off yet.

To say nothing of the fact that one had to drop the engine to get to the alternator, the electrical blew itself out twice in the 4 years we owned it, very few of the features worked with any competence, and we just got our 3rd or 4th safety recall for it (or whatever is left of the parts at the scrapyard).

Consumer Reports rated its reliability as a six - not out of ten, but out of ONE HUNDRED.

Absolute lemons.

needing to ask people what 3rd party chat service they prefer

Yeah Signal’s great and all, but my spouse’s family refuses to use anything but WhatsApp, half my family uses FB Messenger while the other half use Discord (and they are feuding about it), the older folks in my hobby group refuse to learn anything but the default text on their phone (that group chat is an unmanageable NIGHTMARE), and anything from work uses teams…except the US folks who use slack, and now my friends want to get me on Signal, too? Relevant XKCD.

The solution to my problem is not yet another messaging app. I just want ONE inbox!

I’ve been pretty happy with Beeper so far. There are some features that aren’t quite as good as using each app natively, yet, but I think they’re off to a great start considering the sheer scale and variety of interfaces they’re working with. It even gives me tools to deal with the hobby chat anarchy, and now I can send default SMS messages from my computer!