The Tell-Tale Skype

While all technology can be frustrating, I've never run into anything quite like Skype. And I think it's time for Microsoft to stop piling on new features and actually fix this thing before it's too late.

To be clear, I'm worried this will never be fixed. That this cannot be fixed.

See, Skype is an enigma. It is absolutely crucial and necessary, and it works well most of the time. But it also falls apart in the details, and in doing so it is also a burden, a daily annoyance that never seems to rise to the challenge of its promise.

I mean, Skype is magic, right? It's not enough that it gives you the ability to communicate with others, for free, from all around the world. It now does automatic language translation, like the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Skype powers the seven podcast episodes I appear on each week---about 9 hours of content per week, overall---and it drives the daily conversations I have with co-workers and friends. It's how we keep up with each, share information, and files, and reach out when we need an immediate response. Skype is clearly very central to my life. And as such, I must really appreciate it. Right?

Wrong. Skype is infuriating.

And it says something, I think, that the constant drumbeat of the frustration that Skype notifications cause is like a "Chinese water torture as a service," as I think of it, something that is so overwhelmingly bad that I literally need to remind myself, as I have done so while writing this post, that Skype is transformative. A software miracle of sorts.

And yet I would exorcise it from my life if I could.

Perhaps a personal example will help explain.

As you may know, my son Mark is deaf. He wasn't born that way: At just a year old, he came down with bacterial meningitis and almost died, and the potential outcomes of surviving this ordeal were deafness and/or mental retardation. Long story short, Mark received a cochlear implant at 18 months, and a second unit (on the other ear) several years later. (Had this happened today, he'd have gotten both together.) He can hear, not like you and I can hear, but well enough that you can converse with him and you'd never know the difference if it weren't for the hearing aid-like devices on his head. He speaks clearly, sometimes hears amazingly quiet things, and the overall impact of this technology on his life, and our lives, has been nothing short of miraculous.

But when Mark was a baby, taking care of the external part of the implant, the bit that looks like a hearing aid, was, of course, problematic. It is held onto his head with a magnet, and it can fall off easily enough. So when he was a baby, there was an alarm built into the device, so that it would make a droning beeping sound, alerting his parents or others nearby that it had fallen off. He couldn't hear it, of course, as he's deaf. That alarm was for us.

To this day, I still hear that alarm in my nightmares, that beep beep beep be...