I'm not sure whether this goes in "economy" or what, but it's a thread about sales techniques and customer service in Second Life.

Here's a verbatim transcript from an encounter I just had in Second Life -- it epitomizes the witless, 20-something, tekkie asshole or designer with contempt for others that you so often find in SL. I haven't had a chance to go see Sally's improved tikis, but regardless if they look like the Taj Mahal on crack, I doubt I'll be buying them.

From convo inworld August 19, 2006, with someone I've never met who IMs me:

Sally Seattle: dude your huts suck
Sally Seattle: do you have many tropical rentals?
Prokofy Neva: Um, well if you're unhappy about my "huts" you can press refund, and work on improving your communication skills, as they suck, too : )
Prokofy Neva: Yes, lots, and they're all taken : )
Sally Seattle: Oh i didn't buy anything
Sally Seattle: I was going to offer you better huts
Prokofy Neva: no thanks
Sally Seattle: OK!
Prokofy Neva: I like the ones that Jim Lumiere made, they work great, they are always full with a waiting list, and buying huts from people who try to sell huts by saying other people's sucks just isn't on the menu : )
Sally Seattle: **smiley face**
Sally Seattle: who said I was selling?
Prokofy Neva: Sally Seattle: I was going to offer you better huts
Sally Seattle: ooo well done on the copy and paste
Sally Seattle: see no mention of selling anything though
Prokofy Neva: profiles
Sally Seattle: profiles?
Prokofy Neva: prefab homes,tropical paradise,textures,builds,TIKI,islands,furniture,cl othes,bikini,free gift
Sally Seattle: what about it?
Prokofy Neva: sales of tikis
Prokofy Neva: um you are offering FREE tikis?
Prokofy Neva: my you are lame
Sally Seattle: indeed, but I wasn't offering to sell you any
Prokofy Neva: lame
Sally Seattle: And you aren't very good at this are you?
Prokofy Neva: Um, what's more lame that people who do something stupid, is people who talk stupidly , are called on it, and then pretend they didn't do that stupid thing
Prokofy Neva: ROFL
Sally Seattle: ROFLWOFL!
Prokofy Neva: are you like 12 Sally?
Sally Seattle: Why because I told you your huts suck? When they clearly do?
Sally Seattle: They look like someone made them out of lego
Sally Seattle: the big kind for kids with fat fingers
Sally Seattle: If I was looking at renting tropical land from Ravenglass and I saw your sucking fat-fingers lego hut I'd IM you and say 'Hey, your huts suck'
Sally Seattle: and if I made huts over here anyway and thought there might be some mutual improvement in both our lots I might offer you free huts to replace the ones that suck
Sally Seattle: are you like, trying to look bad?
Prokofy Neva: Um, the huts don't suck, hon? they're actually well crafted. They look nothing like legos at all.
Prokofy Neva: You can swear and rant all you like, but YOU just look the more stupid lol
Sally Seattle: no YOU look the more stupid lol, etc
Prokofy Neva: I dont' want free huts because I like these nice ones I have that work well, and I have no objective reason to change something that looks good, has one-touch door management, and is always fully rented.
Prokofy Neva: Oh, I think when you grow up in a few years you may see things differently : )
Sally Seattle: OK, OK, I get it you like the huts that suck, fine, stop talking already

*giggle ... snort*

You know, Prokofy, you make it easy by responding to people who do this. You make it waaay too easy to get a rise out of you.

Oh, they don't get a rise out of me, Alex, I give it right back to them without batting an eye. They get a push-back from me -- that's what I'm famous for.

What, this little budding dominatrix wannabee thinks I'm going to cringe and sob and say, "oh, my tikis are worthless, I have horrible choice in tikis, set me straight, oh, I'll just evict all my tenants from their homes that they chose and like, and impose on them new tikis because well, somebody just built a better tiki and I better just pay homage to them."

Huh?

Frankly, Alex, this is a very good interchange here that more than proves my point that your lifestyle so affects your perception of reality, that you think its rules and rituals should invade public transactions.

But they shouldn't. You don't get to humiliate and demean people in the public marketplace to sell goods. If you do, you get a slap from me. It's an outrage to behave like that, and nobody should. Your *condoning* of that behaviour is more than troublesome.

I'd expect your reaction to be something like, "ROFL, yeah, bet she isn't going to sell many houses THAT way."

Instead, you're so full of your "lifestyle" and its "exigencies" and so full of hatred of me, that you can't see the generic issues, and you can only cackle at my expense, and try to portray me as some huffing and puffing reactive monster unable to see what's "fun" about a girl doing this.

Honestly, the culture of Second Life is a woeful disaster area.

So ... if a five-year-old approaches you and announces, "You're stupid!" will you also spend the next hour arguing with her about it?

You have it backwards. Believe it or not, I'm very much a submissive.



Wowie.



You're kinda cute when you go nuts, you know?

No, Prokofy, I didn't expect any of that. I was just kind of wondering why you didn't just blow the goofball off ... much like I'd hope you would that hypothetical five-year-old.



You really, totally don't see it, do you?

No, I guess you probably do spend hours arguing with every child who tries to slight you ...

You're absolutely right, and you should hunt down every single one of them and engage each one in an "are not!" "are too!" contest.

I guess I still don't understand... did the dude have huts to sell or not? If there were no huts on the table, what was the point of starting an IM? Oh well, I still enjoy the banter at least!

__________________
"'PC Load Letter'? What the fuck does that mean?" - Michael Bolton, Office Space

Uh, the comment about the wannabee domatrix is about this gal with the tikis, obviously that's not *you* Alex. The rest of your remarks aren't worth taking up because they belong to that "are too, are not" school of debate.

Clubside, of course she had Tikis for sale. I pressed on her profile and saw a store lot, "tikis for sale," and pasted the chat into the IM for her to see that I could tell, duh, she had tikis for sale.

She, on the other hand, doubled back and made it seem like her method of contacting me like this wasn't "about" selling but was "about" aesthetics.

See, the convo was supposed to go like this:

20-something Hip Uber Noire Ironic Insult-Radio Jive-Talkin' Coolio IMs you and says "Dude, your tiki sucks." She expects that her happenin' kinda talk will immediately elicit a response, also arch and urbane and twisted, like this:

"Oh? rally? whatcha got then? n e thin better?"

or

"SOB my TIKIS SUCK HELP ME END MY FUGLY TIKI eXISTENCE" ETC

See, that's how she expects it to go. Everything is ironic. Everything is Illuminated. I'm supposed to be hip and cool and insult everybody, and I'm supposed to say, "Doing anything later tonight?" because I'm supposed to be oh-so-impressed by her insult skills. That's why she says, "You're really not good at this," by which she means, "You suck at being arch and cool and insulting like me."

But because we weren't weaned on Alainis Morrisette and South Beach, we say, "Um, your conversational techniques suck hon"

So, now treading water in the world of the non-noire and the non-ironic, she casts around for more tried-and-true techniques, like claiming that she is only about aesthetic improvement of SL, not about selling stuff.

The reason it doesn't make sense Clubside, is because Prok has presented it as a single conversation instead of the half a dozen exchanges between irritatedly slamming closed IM windows that it actually was.

And OMG Prok, I think this is the first time I've seen someone physically gag on their own persecution complex. If you can open your mouth wide enough for the medics to get a tongue depressor in, I'll fix your "verbatim" chatlog for you while they wipe the foam off your chin.


Sally Seattle: dude your huts suck
Sally Seattle: do you have many tropical rentals?
Prokofy Neva: Um, well if you're unhappy about my "huts" you can press refund, and work on improving your communication skills, as they suck, too : )
Prokofy Neva: Yes, lots, and they're all taken : )
Sally Seattle: Oh i didn't buy anything
Sally Seattle: I was going to offer you better huts
Prokofy Neva: no thanks
Sally Seattle: OK!

That was pretty much the end of the conversation as far as I was concerned. I took one look at 'Tiki Bungalo' and thought 'there's a prefab only its mother could love' and anyone who is using it to attract customers to their business is either terminally impaired or trying to make a point.

However, five minutes later...





Prokofy Neva: I like the ones that Jim Lumiere made, they work great, they are always full with a waiting list, and buying huts from people who try to sell huts by saying other people's sucks just isn't on the menu : )
Sally Seattle: **smiley face**
Sally Seattle: who said I was selling?

And what's with those smilies? How can anyone make a creepy smiley? With it's beady colon eyes and sneering bracket mouth and WHAT is with that space in the middle? A smiley should be closed like this or else add a nose, like this :-)

Leaving a blank space like that is very disturbing, because like, where's it nose? What happened to it's face? It's some kind of industrial accident, noseless, creep-out smiley.

But anyway, forgotten about. Hey, you said 'no thanks' so I stopped caring at that point.

Minutes later...




Prokofy Neva: Sally Seattle: I was going to offer you better huts
Sally Seattle: ooo well done on the copy and paste
Sally Seattle: see no mention of selling anything though
Prokofy Neva: profiles
Sally Seattle: profiles?
Prokofy Neva: prefab homes,tropical paradise,textures,builds,TIKI,islands,furniture,cl othes,bikini,free gift
Sally Seattle: what about it?
Prokofy Neva: sales of tikis
Prokofy Neva: um you are offering FREE tikis?
Prokofy Neva: my you are lame
Sally Seattle: indeed, but I wasn't offering to sell you any
Prokofy Neva: lame
Sally Seattle: And you aren't very good at this are you?


That is, you aren't very good at the psychic divination of what people were going to say before you decided to run screaming and waving your arms down the crazy paving.

Minutes later...




Prokofy Neva: Um, what's more lame that people who do something stupid, is people who talk stupidly , are called on it, and then pretend they didn't do that stupid thing
Prokofy Neva: ROFL
Sally Seattle: ROFLWOFL!

Yeah, rofflewaffle. Because you really should have let it go about fifteen minutes ago and I'm trying to update my SL Exchange box and you're just still playground raving, aren't you?


Prokofy Neva: are you like 12 Sally?
Sally Seattle: Why because I told you your huts suck? When they clearly do?
Sally Seattle: They look like someone made them out of lego
Sally Seattle: the big kind for kids with fat fingers
Sally Seattle: If I was looking at renting tropical land from Ravenglass and I saw your sucking fat-fingers lego hut I'd IM you and say 'Hey, your huts suck'
Sally Seattle: and if I made huts over here anyway and thought there might be some mutual improvement in both our lots I might offer you free huts to replace the ones that suck
Sally Seattle: are you like, trying to look bad?
Prokofy Neva: Um, the huts don't suck, hon? they're actually well crafted. They look nothing like legos at all.
Prokofy Neva: You can swear and rant all you like, but YOU just look the more stupid lol
Sally Seattle: no YOU look the more stupid lol, etc


Let's get some perspective, this is the hut in question:



Prokofy, the hut is NOT great, trust me. And you know what else? You had me at 'no thanks', so there really wasn't any reason to extend the pain.

Fact is, I wasn't trying to sell you anything for cash money and if you'd lifted the sides of your tinfoil beanie enough to hear what I was offering, I'd have told you that in the first place.

REZOLUTION has worked with several tropical rental businesses before, people like what we make. We are always open to making up standard packages for them to tempt new renters and in return every new resident gets to hear about where all their cool new shit came from: REZOLUTION TIKI. We get a lot of collector customers that way. And anyone who doubts that can IM me in-world for a reference.

This is the REZOLUTION stuff:



It's mutual promotion that doesn't cost either party a bean and it's far and away a great idea for both parties.

So then I went back to boxing up the new products I was working on and then minutes later:

Prokofy Neva: I dont' want free huts because I like these nice ones I have that work well, and I have no objective reason to change something that looks good, has one-touch door management, and is always fully rented.
Prokofy Neva: Oh, I think when you grow up in a few years you may see things differently : )
Sally Seattle: OK, OK, I get it you like the huts that suck, fine, stop talking already


OK, at this point you're scaring me, because I'm seriously regretting coming anywhere near you and you're starting to sound a bit hysterical and in the end I had to beg you to stop. I feel so dirty.

And then you come here to publically fantasize and rub yourself all over with lard and then for an encore wordlessly IM me the URL.

Seriously, take your pills, you'll fell a lot better for it.

In all fairness, Prokofy, she's right. Speaking objectively, your huts do ... need work.

I would not, personally, have approached you by telling you that they "suck," however, and Sally, in Prokofy's defense, your initial approach was rude and would immediately put most anyone on the defensive, at which point they're certainly not going to be inclined to listen to what you have to say. My response to you would probably have been to blow you off and ignore you.

Prokofy, my point to you is that you wasted a ridiculous amount of time and effort fighting with this person. That you continued to approach her several times after an initial exchange makes it even worse -- why would you ever do that? Why bother? What are you hoping to prove?

Bottom line: Your huts really are ... not the best. Sally's way of bringing that to your attention was inflammatory and counterproductive. Your inability to at least just blow her off and move on betrays a disturbing immaturity that's all the more unfortunate because I believe you really are an intelligent person, but you lack self-control and perspective, so all of your intelligence just flies right out the window the moment you feel provoked somehow.

What a mess.

No, Alex, that's where you're wrong.

My huts do NOT suck, not in the slightest.

BTW, they aren't "my" huts, but built by Jim Lumiere, who is primarily a furniture and gadget maker of long standing in the community. Houses aren't really his primary line, but he does do good houses, and I love his houses.

You could say, oh, this is just a matter of taste, and people will be endlessly subjective about it.

But, let's look at the facts of how you really have to rent things in the virtual world, and what in fact rents, and what everyone else finds attractive too.

I much, much prefer Jim Lumiere's huts to Sally Seattle's. And I'm confident that if you put out both sets of huts on 2 tropical islands, if we had the land and the time to do this experiment, that the huts I've chosen will stay more occupied -- just as they do in my actual rental communities.

There are two reasons for this. One, Jim's aesthetics and choices are simply better for a virtual world, and this one in particular. He's chosen a square, not a circle, and in a world where there is an XYZ grid, trying to make circles (he also has a circular building that is a kind of closed garden gazebo or besedka as they call them in Russian) can be very hard, and few do it well. Round can cause problems in placement, make havoc with trying to put pictures on the wall, and also cause texturing issues.

Jim has opted to make pastel coloured stucco walls -- indeed, he's had the good sense to chose the Linden's stucco out of the library. If you've ever noticed, the builds that the Lindens make look best in this world because, well, it's their world, they are professional 3-D graphics experts, they know its rules best, and they tend to tile best and make stuff look good best proportionately to the world. Amateur builders like Sally tend to go for the cheap photorealistic look that is crappy in an aesthetic sense.

Jim's stucco looks natural and realistic; it "fits in the world". Sally has bamboo that is a *photograph* of bamboo that she has swiped off the Internet somewhere and worked in PSP - or perhaps not even worked, who knows. But it's a photograph of bamboo that cannot conform to the laws of physics and the proportions of SL, precisely because it is swiped off some RL photo. The shadows, the tiling, even the size is all wrong, as anybody with even a modicum of architectural sense can see.

Sally's bamboo is flat, rigid where it needs to wrap and have depth and shadows; Jim has solved that SL world problem by using squares, stucco, and pastel colours and not attempted that realistic-photo type of look that is so beloved by suburban mediocrities in SL like Sally and her friends, but which just looks so barkingly bad. To be sure, on his roof, he's gone with the "photo-real" a bit but he's made sure to have dark elements and tiling that give it depth, not the flat poster feel.

The better architects like Barnesworth Anubis and Ingrid Ingersoll long ago in their first week in SL learned that using prims and textures of subtle quality with really excellent tiling and proportion is vital to making an SL building look good; slapping stark, brightly lit photos off the real world on to a prim is a quick recipe for making something look tacky -- just as Sally's do.

Further, she's added insult to injury by putting an even MORE fake photo of books or a bar inside her Tiki, which is really, really lame. It's a quick immersion killer, like most of the other "over-busyness" in her scene -- the cacophony of colour on the barstools -- the colourful drinks which look fake and flat, and everything else in the scene, including the pancake white flat sand -- which looks like it isn't expenso private island, but decorated prims.

Sally's little hovels are meant to be on an absolutely rigidly flat piece of land. But everyone knows that on the mainland, the Lindens terraformed the sims to have real character -- mountains and valleys, inlets and streams, coves and bays, little eddies and sculpted curves in the coastline. So Jim's structure that has stilts, like a real atoll stilt building in the RL (which Eric Linden chose for the northern moth sims) is by far the better building choice. I can put out a dozen Tikis on the rocky coastline of Cub and they really look good and more natural than rows of soldier-Tikis on pancake-flat white boards.

Another hugely important point to make about my choice in Tikis versus Sally's is that hers are bars, or supposedly fake community space. Anyone in the rentals business moving homes, as distinct from clubs, knows that people actually don't spend much time at a community space like this, they go indoors. In fact, on my Cub Water Club rentals, I, too, have a Tiki bar with tropical drinks and wooden boxes with FAQs in them, and some natural pools and meditation cushions. They look great but probably I'm the only one who spends any time around them, while in IMs or helping customers.

Most other people GO INDOORS. And in my Tikis they CAN unlike Sally's. Jim's lovely little huts have a one-touch closeable door that gives you PRIVACY. And PRIVACY is what people want, so they can either cyber, or, more often than not, just socialize and quietly look at pictures or talk or hang out with their friends.

The proof in the pudding for me in a building isn't what I think is aesthetic or what Sally thinks is aesthetic, since the Sallies of the world are all too many. It's what rents. And in Cub Water Club, every single Tiki is always rented, they fill up the instant they vacate, and I constantly get requests about them and even put up 2 more little villages for people. In another area where people have the option to take down the Tiki and build their own, most don't. And in Cub, precisely because of Jim's more subtle construction and use of pastel and inworld texturing rather than outworld texture, tenants have a base from which to add their own. One of the beauties of Cub Water Club for me is that people have built their own docks and decks and under buildings and decorated the same exact unit in a hundred different ways, it's always fun to see.

So no, you're all wrong Alex, and the rest of you who take a cursory look at two buildings without their context, or without consideration of both the higer aesthetic issues I've raised here about texturing and the pitfalls of photorealism in our fantastic world, which does better when architects follow its laws to make things a little more simpler or a little fantastic rather than "photorealistic". AND I've raised the practical considerations of homes vs. backdrops to a Disney movie -- closeable windows and doors, and habitability. Sally's hut has neither.

I don't see that I've wasted any time here. If this girl wishes to sell her Tikis, she needs to find a more pleasant means to make her sales. If she had been pleasant in her pitch, who knows, she might have found that I tried out one of her Tikis in the bar, and made a sale, or who knows, perhaps she might have learned that she needs to make closeable Tikis if she wants to really sell them for people (and if they DO close, I can see that they would look crappy when closed due to her photorealism issues).

What I find absolutely appalling -- rather like imposing an avatar on someone -- is that this aggressive little idiot could imagine that *just because she thinks so* she could disrupt the lives and homes of a few dozen people and insist that *her* Tiki replace the existing Tiki they have chosen. God, it's a good thing that nobody can govern your prims but yourself in Second Life.

What you have to realize Sally, is that if you come at me and assault me like this inworld -- and you're emblematic of many in a rather spoiled entitlement-happy nasty generation that is like you -- you'll get a very big pushback from me. I view fighting back against people like you as part of the necessary civilizing efforts that have to take place in SL. You don't get to talk that way to people and make such ugly and stupid assumptions. You live in a world with a common public space where people have different values and perceptions than you do. Learn to accommodate them.

Far from being "inflammatory" or "counterproductive", I think my effort to teach Sally a lesson, while it may be lost on Sally and her supporter Alex, has made the larger points and there are some who, remembering this story, might be given pause as they try to sell their wares.

I'm also thinking that when Jim reads this, he'll just chuckle. He's sold zillions of his Tikis with numerous happy customers. If somebody doesn't like the stubby legs the Tiki are on, they can redo them with other textures and modify it -- the items are modifiable. In fact, he has other models with different wooden legs that some people like better.

I'm confident that people with more intelligence and wit that either Sally or Alex can muster will understand this episode COMPLETELY. There may only be one or two in the audience. For them, I write. If not for them, someone who will, eventually come along and laugh out loud in recognition of the truths I have revealed.

Goodness! What was the word count on that post, I wonder?

I bet I may well be the only person who actually read all of it.

Anyway, do tell how is this supporting Sally: "Sally's way of bringing that to your attention was inflammatory and counterproductive."

... and try to keep the explanation to fewer than 100,000 words?

Let's just say, then, that I personally do not find your huts especially asthetically pleasing, and allow me to also point out that at no point did I say that they "suck" -- in fact, I specifically argued against that kind of approach. Is it acceptable to you that I, personally, happen to dislike your hu -- the huts that you use?