Communications in Second Life are quite varied and easy. You can IM (Instant Message or type). You can voice chat or talk over the microphone. You can talk over skype or the phone. You can send offline messages back and forth too. But sometimes things happen when you least expect. You can lose internet temporarily and to plan for that, you can give certain people you trust (non-stalker types) your cell phone number for texting. For example, I lost electrical power one time before a DJ event at Dolls of Death. I was able to use my smart phone to log onto SL and send an instant message to Cinder, owner of the club, to let him know I would be late or not be there at all. That type of backup communication can come in very handy.
I have a few people whom I trust with my home phone number and they trust me with theirs. If something were to happen where I could not be online for a while, I would be able to contact them and keep them posted as to what is going on. But no amount of planning prepared me for what happened to me the month of July.
On July 3, I fell very ill. So ill that I do not remember events and I was pretty much out of my mind. It was initially pneumonia but was later complicated with a breakdown of my immune system. I was in a 3 day coma and hospitalized for a month. During that time, I would have been unable to contact my SL family and friends. What happened was that my close and trusted SL friends/family were phoning my RL wife jojo. Fortunately, she knew most of them by their SL names and she was able to fill them in on what was happening to me. Unfortunately, the cell phone they were using to call on was about to be shut off due to non-payment of the service bill. My wife did not know how to pay it. She brought me the phone later on when I was off the breathing tube and my hands were no longer tied, along with a credit card, but I always paid it online. The problem was, I did not have a computer in intensive care and jojo did not know my username/password for my account. Hell, I could not even remember that information in my current state. So communication broke down for a while. So even with my SL family/friends knowing my cell and home phone information, communication was still a problem.
One of my SL friends just happened to live within 10 minutes of the hospital I was at so she would come out just about every night I was out of ICU and visited for several hours. We were able to do lots of catching up however she was not in the same circle of friends as my SL friends/family so she was unable to relay information to them about me. Still, it was wonderful having her there. It was also fortuitous that we had been RL friends since high school. We had lots to talk about and free movies to watch which were provided by the hospital.
Eventually, I was let out of ICU and into some other care unit. I borrowed my mother-in-law's laptop and was able to pay on my phone account which reactivated it. That didn't matter much though due to the fact that cell service there was very weak. Still, I was able to text most of my friends. My MIL's computer allowed me to logon to SL but it was very slow and even more difficult to type on. So logging onto SL was a huge chore. Needless to say, I did not do it very often.
Communication resumed almost in full by the time I was released from the hospital nearly a month later. I created a notecard which I could hand out that explained my long absence and while it seemed impersonal, it prevented me from having to explain to each and every one of my over 200 friends why I was away for so long. And while it is very highly unlikely that any of you will have to vanish from SL for that long, it sure is nice to have some sort of solid backup communication plan in place, just in case.
We are all real people here. We are a society. We deserve to know what happens to our dear friends. Make sure you have some sort of backup communication plan in place. Make sure your RL family members know about your close friends in SL and know how to handle the bills if you are ever incapacitated. And finally, to my dear friends from the past who have simply vanished without a word; I deserve to know. It hurts when you leave without a trace. The very least you can do is let the rest of us know you are leaving and not returning. We deserve to know. And thank you El for at least popping in once in a while to say hi. You have no idea how much that means to us.
