My current mood: 

Ok so in the category of terrifyingly silly technical glitches that annoy the universe out of you, can anyone tell me how to stop a single contact from constantly disappearing off of my WLM contacts list? Yes, I literally do mean “disappearing”. =P When I first added this contact on WLM something didn’t work and the contact didn’t appear on my list, so I had to go and try adding him on my WL homepage. That worked, but then after a few hours a second instance of the same ID appeared on my connections list, that was looking permanently offline. So then I made the mistake of removing the repeated ID, which resulted in the working instance getting removed as well. Then I re-added the contact and things were working fine until a few days ago when the current royal mess-up started. Now every time I log out and log back in, that specific contact is no longer on my list. [And this is on my mobile account.]

On the other hand, as I mentioned before, I don’t see the correct online / offline status for my contacts on either one of my accounts. And to top that, some of the contacts that I only have on the messenger and not my profile page, also keep disappearing and reappearing. [Is it now the case that you absolutely have to have a contact on both messenger and the profile page?!] Except I didn’t know that they were going to reappear, so I re-added them, and now I have 2 instances of these contacts, and I guess you can imagine what will happen if I try removing the extra copy. Yeah, the exact same mess. =P

Ridiculous, isn’t it? From what I read on the web I’m not the only one with these issues at the moment. And I have no clue when the darn thing is going to start properly working again. What’s even more confusing is that both my accounts are experiencing the exact same problems with the exact same contacts. I wonder if that’s because the 2 accounts are linked?! A few of my friends [including an MSie, ironically! ;)] suggest that I should create some sort of a back up account, brand new and with no links to the other accounts, and add my connections in there, just in case things get worse!! Well I wonder, just how many WL accounts does 1 person need, and how many instances of me do my friends need to have on their connection lists? =))) But if things keep looking scary, I may as well do that.

Of course my smarty pants friend xo tells me something like “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s this thing called Google Talk…”. =))) Well d’ah, I know there are other messengers out there, but how am I ever going to get everyone on my rather lengthy connections list to switch to another messenger, just so that the other one will also at some point mal-function? =P Specially since neither me nor anyone else want to switch to GTalk or Skype or any other messenger from WLM, due to the fact that the other services simply don’t have the WLM functionalities [on a good day when WLM actually functions. 😉 ]

Honestly, Microsoft’s decision to make Live services unavailable to a number of countries including Iran, makes the thought of abandoning WLM all the more appealing right now. Well, perhaps gradually I will…..