Politics of IM

I always find chatting online to be more complicated than it should be. It seems that everyone has their own stupid habits with how they interact with others. Here is but a short list of my annoyances:

Smilies

The over use of smilies and especially those obnoxious customized animated ones is just offensive. It gets worse when the animations replace almost every letter of the alphabet with an animated version of it. You have to remember that the people who use the animated smilies say they are "expressing" themselves and such. I would have to agree with them though, it really expresses the status of their IQ.

Abbreviations

MSN and the like isn't exactly the place for literary masterpieces but something has to be said about some of the idiotic abbreviations the kids are using these days. It's pretty much a competition to abbreviate as many words as possible. Once every word has been sufficiently abbreviated, they go one step further and misspell every other word. Eg. 'boy' would now be 'boi'. 

Status

I'm sure everyone at some point is guilty of this, leaving your status as online while walking away to do something thats actually productive. But what's worse is when your online status never sleeps. By that I mean your always signed into MSN, 24/7. Is there something to be gained by that? Some of the excuses are truly sad, like: "I have broadband so I'm always on the internet." and "What if someone wants to talk to me?". Well, there are these other fabulous inventions called email and the telephone, there are even those fancy telephones that are wireless and receive text message, much like MSN. Who would have thunk it?! 

Bitchy? Unfair? Not important? Well... It's all of those things, but it's all true. Thats what counts.