I(Don't)Chat.

I like iChat â€" it's cute. You can have your own customized icons, and you can keep it on just in case people want to talk to you from the privacy of their keyboards. It took me a few months â€" OK, a year and a half â€" to set up my iChat. I registered with AOL for a screen name, and I crafted my own icon (a picture of my cat Lila). There's only one problem: I never use it.

A few years ago, I was writing a story about chat software, and I made my husband (who has a Windows machine at work) download all the programs, too, so I could try them out. Chatting came in very handy. If I wanted to tell him something, I'd just write, "Busy?" And, bless his soul, he'd write back, "Never too busy for you." Then we'd talk with much more privacy than a phone in a cubicle allows. I liked that. But he soon tired of it. "I was going to ask you whether you didn't have work to do," he wrote one day. "Then I remembered, this is your work." Soon after that, he started to be "away" all day, so I couldn't chat with him even if I wanted to. Our chatting days ended unceremoniously â€" luckily, my story was also finished.

Fast-forward to today: I fired up iChat, and almost everyone in the office is connected via Bonjour, so I really feel like I'm part of the crowd now. And my husband also reluctantly agreed to get an AIM screen name so we could chat. But I'd rather walk over to talk to a coworker, and after the first couple of days, my husband was always mysteriously "away" again.

The thing I finally figured out is that chat imitates life. Either you're a chatter or you're not. I'm not a chatter in real life, and having a cute software program hasn't changed that (and as for the video aspect â€" forget it). So instead of chatting, my husband and I have gone back to communicating the "old-fashioned way": by e-mail.

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By Jackie Dove