So How Many Days You Will Stay Away This Time, Mr. Frank?
This post is only to record that Mr. Frank had come back on CH to say goodbye again to his fans today, in the middle of my working day at 2:45 pm to be exact. I did not see this coming and did not check the telegram message on time thus missed this “historical” moment for only a few minutes.
It seemed that he had only stayed for less than 10 min in his “Farewell, good friends on CH, may you have a very nice day!” room. To my comfort, he did mention my name during that short time period, although it put my sadness to the highest possible level and ruined the rest of my working hours and the whole evening. Immediately following his announcement and departure on the CH, 4 or more different rooms in which his fans are talking about his leave (among which 2 were started by the biggest scammer in the CH, Twitter, Instagram (…) named “2Y”. She was telling all kinds of makeup stories about his “hiding/disappearance”, yet I couldn’t get into any one of those rooms to share my sad feelings as today is only the 5th day of my “staying away from the App for a week plan”!
Oh, did I forget to tell you, my dear friends, I had to make the “plan” to wean off my addiction to the CH?
What, you didn’t know that old ppl could also be addicted to social media? Well, now you do. For me, I believe that my brain has never developed enough to acquire self-control capability.
Don’t you dare to tell me that I am old enough to know better!
If you read my previous posts, you should know that I have been working on leaving CH 2 weeks after my first encounter with it.
Clearly, I have been failing.
Mr. Frank had made it relatively easy for me lately tho, by having been on the App almost daily for the past 5–6 weeks and stayed for 10 to 12 hours long each time! And on top of that, a final draw arrived last Thursday— he (or someone in his room) blocked my access to his room, which was the very first time that happened to me and it hurt, terribly.
What the hell?
Okay, I must admit it was partly my fault as well.
I was getting annoyed by his intense presence on CH lately because he mostly came on at the most inconvenient time for me: weekdays from midnight (or 2–3 am) to next noon (or 2–3 pm), which means that I had to cut my sleep hours short and sacrifice my morning working hours if I wished to focus on what he had to say. Thus when joining him in his room, I often rejected his invitation to try to get some sleep and work done, which also helped clear up the already very crowded speaker’s stage.
His room had become too large (>200 ppl) for me to speak comfortably and often times I even did not bother to join him in his room at all.
Last Thursday, knowing that he had been talking for 12 hours+ straight, I thought it should be a good time to joining him and others in his room to first greet him and second remind him of his promise of joining a singing room that Jeff and I would be hosting the following evening. Disappointingly, however, the room was still so crowded that made me believe that he and his listeners would be hanging around for a while. I had not gotten his invite to get on the speakers’ stage immediately after I entered the room, I quietly left the crowded room intending to come back to it a bit later.
So I cruised around the CH hallway and checked out quickly a few rooms and then came back to join his room. He was still talking, which made me leave again and then came back again a while later. He was still talking…it seemed endless to me. So I left quickly again.
After few rounds of such in and out, I suddenly found his room disappeared from my CH hallway.
So I had to click on one of his usual listeners hoping to get in his room that way, yet a red banner showed up at the top of my screening stating, “The room you are looking for is no longer available, starts a new one instead?”
It was the very first time that such things happened to me. But something went wrong. Was it because CH just opened up to Android users and the system could not handle the heavy traffic? Or I was blocked by someone in his room?
To find out, I logged out and back in few times, the problem remained.
I installed and reinstalled the App, the problem remained.
At that point, I believed someone had blocked me. Such blocks have happened to some of my CH friends lately, which should not surprise me. However, I am not someone who speaks offensively, nor I am speaking in other rooms than Mr. Frank’s. More importantly, I don’t even speak in Mr. Franks’ rooms whenever the room is filled with strangers!
Hello…
I am a harmless old lady who won’t trigger anger, jealousy, admiration, or whatever, unblock me, and let me in…
Yet all I could do was frantically refreshing my CH hallway until I almost gave up!
“Forbidden fruit always tastes the best” — I simply could not give up, so I asked Du, the sweetest and the most helpful mathematician who was inside the room, to see if he could help to get rid of the blocker. After he had asked around the speakers to unblock me, I still could not see his room. Du then started to remove ppl from the speaker’s stage to the audience’s place, one at a time. At the time he was getting ready to remove the 5th suspects, Mr. Frank’s room popped up in my hallway and I immediately got in!
To my big surprise, however, the man, Mr. Frank, to whom I had been trying to speak in the last few minutes (although it felt more like hours), was sitting right at the very first position of the first row in the audience, which means that he, Mr. Frank, was the one who blocked me!
Why do I say that you ask?
Because his sitting place is for someone who gets off speaker’s stage the last. It was his removal of himself from the speaker’s stage that had released my block!
Later, a few of my CH friends, including Du, of course, had suggested that I should rule out each of those other 4 suspects to be certain. Honestly, at that moment, I was too disgusted by this “block” feature of the App to even stay for another minute more. I was totally ready to leave the damn CH for good!
Thus, the 7-day off CH plan.
Let’s live with the suspicion that Mr. Frank was the one who blocked me happily ever after, shall we?
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What is the big deal for someone to block me, you say, since it happens to everyone else? Well, to tell you the truth, I have hated this CH feature ever since I heard of it for the very first time. And I have never used it myself to block anyone. I chose to leave the room I am annoyed by whoever, rather than blocking those “annoying” speakers. Looks like that I was right all along. The experience of being blocked by some random person indeed felt awful.
Okay, I am not exaggerating here. Just close your eyes to imagine a scenario: your friends are having a birthday party in a closed room but you are kept out of it. You even can hear them laughing and singing but you simply cannot be in the room with them.
Cruel, isn’t it?
This block function clearly defeats the original idea of this sound-based social App — the CH was created to encourage ppl from different walks of life with different views to mingle. Now explain to me how blocking other’s access to a room helps to reach this goal?!
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Back to this post, let’s count the days here, last Thursday, May 20th of 2021, was the last time I saw my favorite CH speaker. I totally missed the chance to say goodbye to him today.
So how long do you think that Mr. Frank will leave a void in my CH life this time?
