The phone rings.

I’m in about fourth form. I’m on the computer in the lounge, playing one of the games on this fantastic list. This is not an unusual after-school activity for me. You might get the impression I don’t have the most happening social life, and you’d be right. Of course, there’s only so much happening when you’re 14.

I wasn’t really expecting a call. Odds are good that it’s someone calling my parents who, would you believe, are at work at 4:30 in the afternoon! Somehow I never quite managed to carry that sarcasm over the phone line. Or maybe someone’s calling to try to sell us Sky again. Yes, I’d like the cricket and the rugby. No, not at that price. Maybe if you stopped calling people so often you wouldn’t need to charge so much.

I answer it anyway – no one else is home. Turns out it was neither of those. “Hello,” a girl begins, “is Dave there?”

“Yeap,” I respond, already off balance. I can count the number of girls I know well enough to have my number on one hand, and I wouldn’t need all the fingers. It’s interesting, too, how playing computer games puts you into a socially disadvantaged frame of mind. I’m a wing commander over there. All the talking heads, they love me. It’s like real life, except awesome and fake. Reality knocks you back.

“What are you up to?”, she asks. Now, shit. I hate answering questions like this with “playing a computer game.” (Perhaps I should spice it up with “fighting the Kilrathi!”). Not that I feel it’s such a bad thing to be doing. It just sounds so lame. I make some sort of feeble reply. “Oh, just on the computer aye.”

“Oh yeah.” By now, I have gone completely on the defensive. Just absolutely and completely. Self esteem issues, peer pressure, bad time of day, whatever, I’m holding a negative self-image and feeling the spotlight on it.

The conversation only lasts a few minutes, if that. I suppose I was too young to realise it at the time, but man, did I turn Opportunity into a negative experience. It seemed that she got hold of my number via a friend or something and was just trying to make a social connection. Looking back, I feel rather sorry for her. She was just being friendly and got a bitter pill for her efforts. I guess it’s unfortunate that someone would have to suffer because of my insecurity. That’s not fair.

I never found out who it was. She never even said how she got my number. In fact, I don’t think I even got her name. After I hung up, followed by an irritated couple of minutes, the experience was largely forgotten (apart from the minor psychological trauma that follows most teenage experiences). It certainly wasn’t a turning point, as you may have thought this post was building up to.

A couple of years later, though, I almost completely stopped playing computer games. Whether it was a phase I grew out of, or I got busy with other things, or I just played them so much I got sick of them, I don’t really know. And it’s not, of course, it’s not as if whether you play computer games or not determines your life. It was merely a crutch. But for whatever reasons, I just completely lost interest in them. Now, I actually have some quite fond memories of the games themselves. But I can’t help but wonder if it should’ve happened sooner.

The interesting thing is that it wasn’t until a number of years after, when I did have a social life of at least some description, that I was able to realise any of this. It’s so easy to sit at the PC and pilot your Sabre to the glory of the Federation, so much easier than actual life. Life, though, is going on without you. It’s not a good place to be. At the time, I didn’t even realise what I was doing wrong. It’s only looking back that I can be so glad I got out of there.

For all the promise of the Free Market, it’s a little unfortunate that incompetence and poor customer service seem to be the rule more often than they are the exception. Where’s the market forces? I guess it’s hard to vote with your feet when hot coals constitute every single option.

Web hosting is an interesting one, because of course it is so new that there are no large, established names that can rely solely on their brand. On the other hand, demand has absolutely exploded so new customers are everywhere. It’s also a pretty unhindered market – location doesn’t matter, there’s not really any lock-in (just re-point your domain), and as said above, no companies are large enough to mess things up. Frankly, I’m pretty happy with what I get – a domain for $US10 per year and pretty good hosting for $US44 per year is a drop in the bucket compared to all the hours I spend on it. I would like to know why going with a New Zealand host costs so much more – surely our costs aren’t higher than those in the US? Surely there’s enough New Zealanders to get some economies of scale? And how come .nz domains cost so much more?

For the most part, when I see people talk about their hosting companies on their blogs, it’s overwhelmingly positive. (Compare this to comments on, say, cellphone carriers, or broadband.) But you also get the other side. Recently Dreamhost had some rather significant downtime – not unusual for them, I hear. In what seems like misguided PR at its finest, their apology was “ha ha, did you see that, LOL!”

I am with Total Choice Hosting. This is because they hosted our previous site, nocents.org (RIP), since the first bunch wiped out our forums without warning or backup due to some obscure T&Cs violation. Frankly, TCH are pretty damn good – it’s a cheap service and you get good performance, good uptime, and great service – people actually reply (!) to your support requests. There was one incident recently that soured our relationship – our site went down, I combed their site, forums, status pages and found nothing about it so filed a support request. Oh yes, they said, there was a hardware failure and we are restoring from the backup now! Check the forums for updates! Well, that’s cool I guess, but I don’t think I see anything in your forums. I checked back later, and again, couldn’t find anything anywhere referring to it. So, had we not noticed, we might never have known it was down. Which is unfortunate, because their backup was a day old and my most recent blog post had disappeared. (Yes, even at my posting rate. How unlikely was that?) Fortunately, I still had a copy of it in my text editor. This was purely by chance, and if I hadn’t, it would have just been outright lost. Not so cool, but… all in all, considering what we pay, this isn’t too unreasonable. My only real issue was with their poor communication. Where I mean, poor from my point of view, but also dumb from their point of view – it is much cheaper to post in your forum than answer lots of individual support requests. This is the incompetence bit, where everyone loses, as opposed to being screwed over, where only the consumer loses. Not sure which one is worse, but at least if someone screws you over and is up-front about it, you can respect that. It’s hard to respect stupidity.

Here’s what sucks, though. PHP5 came out in 2004. It’s now 2007, and PHP5 is fast becoming the standard. I have been quite patient about this. But, you know, there’s patience and there’s eternity. Apparently TCH have opted for the latter:

With PHP 5 having been out for so long now, and many of todays applications beginning to require it, I am surprised that TCH has no plan to migrate. How about making some new servers available with PHP5 so that new or existing customers can choose or migrate to them? [etc]

[Jan 14 2007] Currently there are no plans to migrate to PHP5.

I mean, it’s bad enough that they haven’t done it yet. But they don’t even have plans to do it? I really like being a customer of TCH. I just don’t understand. Why would you force your customers to leave?