This Tuesday, October 25 was one of my most beautiful mornings of this fall 2022. Firstly because the weather was nice and mild and it was useless to open the umbrella. Then, because the media agenda was not overflowing (too much) with bad news. But above all, above all, because WhatsApp is broken down. Don’t think I am technophobe or anti-Facebook activist, I spend my days on a computer, a phone and all possible variations. Simply, these few hours have been an enchanted parenthesis in our modern life where not a minute (or almost) passes without receiving a message, a notification, a photo or a video.
Happiness started from the subway. Our journey is quite short, but since the trains are connected to the Internet, we are regularly entitled to those who like nothing more than to communicate in video mode with their friends or their families. The time of a few metro stations, we undergo the entirety of an often animated exchange, sometimes at the limit of the shouting match. We dare not suggest to these neighbors without embarrassment the wearing of a helmet. Too afraid to pass for a grumpy old woman who can’t stand anything. After all, conversations between two people in the flesh do not bother us. What a difference ? But we admit it, this morning, we appreciated not being invited into the privacy of our public transport partners.
Walk straight without a phone
On the way to the office, we discovered another virtue in the breakdown. Deprived of their favorite messaging service, fans were finally looking at the world around them. Usually they walk to the rhythm of their phones, stopping abruptly and without looking around when they receive a message. They zigzag from side to side on the sidewalk over the answer they’re writing, preventing anyone from passing them, grumbling when someone bumps into them as if they weren’t responsible for the collision and of their misfortune. Finally, for lack of messages to watch and read, they were going straight! Better, some of them gave us the smiles they usually reserve for their screens and the photos that their mother/cousin/best friend has just sent them.
Arrived on the floor of the office, we heard a lot of people complaining. Inevitably, our colleagues are used to having most of their exchanges via whatsApp. Why this messaging system rather than another? Simplicity, ease of sending photos and creating groups, habit acquired over the years quite simply. It is by this means that they prepare the meetings, send their proposals for subjects, answer or exchange a few little jokes. And this morning, nothing. We found them distraught. We suggested that they use one of the other multiple instant messengers they have (Slack, Messenger, Teams, etc.). We even dared to talk about simple SMS. We made faces in response. It was not clear what was the fundamental difference between these apps that prevented switching from one to another. We didn’t try to dig deeper.
On our side, we rediscovered the pleasure of conversation and the coffee machine. Until the moment when we wanted to speak discreetly. We then discovered that there were no more nooks upstairs to isolate ourselves and, even worse, that by dint of writing, we no longer knew how to whisper. And, miraculously, at that moment, WhatsApp started working again! Work resumed. Our mother was able to send dozens of photos of her vacation in Portugal, our sister, the first steps of her newborn baby and our friends, dozens of messages to fix the day, then the time, then the place of our next aperitif. Very quickly, we could no longer follow the rhythm. Hey, WhatsApp, when’s the next outage?