1. There are no AOStaffers available to respond to you immediately.
This may be because of the time of day, for although we are an
all-volunteer org. consisting of budget unstructured travelers
communicating from all over the globe, the vast majority of AOS
volunteers are located in North America, and (although some of us
are nightowls!) we have to sleep sometime, which means if you come on
our site and try to contact us "in the middle of the night" in North
America, you may have a longer wait for a response than at other times
of day. But it also may just be because we are overloaded, i.e.,
getting more chat requests than we have volunteers online to respond.
This is the approximate equivalent of walking into your bank branch and
the branch not having enough tellers available to attend to your needs.
Suggested corrective action: (1) try again later; (2)
slide your browser window up to a corner of your screen and keep it
open at a minimal size, so you can keep an eye on it while you do other
work (or play) online as you wait for a staffer to become available. If
you absolutely, positively have to leave before you get a reply, then
just leave your email address and our email staff will reply to you in
email; or, if you have an identity on any other IM system (AIM, Yahoo,
MSN, Jabber, etc.) just tell us which one, and what your screenname or
contact name is, and we will find you the next time you log on to it.
2. Cyberproblems. Although
cybertechnology can be very cool and provide us human beings with lots
of benefits we didn't have before it was invented/created, the Internet is far from perfect,
and in fact there are so many pieces of hardware and software involved
in the process of transmitting a simple line of text from one person's
keyboard to another person's screen that it sometimes seems incredible
that it all actually works (as well as it does and as often as it
does)! And in fact if any one
of those pieces of hardware and software along the communication
pathway via the Internet between you and us is dysfunctional at any
moment, this can prevent the transmission of the text. The problem
could be occurring in your computer, it could be residing in the computer of the staffer attempting to send you the text, or it could be in any server computer along the way, acting as a relay.
Suggested corrective action:
Sometimes these problems "fix themselves" within a very short
period of time, so you can either (1) try again later or (2) slide your
browser window up to a corner of
your screen and keep it open at a minimal size, so you can keep an eye on it while you do other work (or play) online as you wait for a staffer to become available. But
(3) if the problem persists, here is a little "troubleshooting"
procedure you can perform to try to identify, isolate, and correct the
problem.
1. Try a simple refresh of
your browser page. We have found that sometimes we do not see the lines
typed by people trying to communicate with us, or they do not see our
responses, even though everything "looks normal" in terms of operation
on their browser, simply because their browser page has "gone stale". If this doesn't fix the problem, then...
2. Try closing your browser window and reopening it, and reconnecting
with our site and the page you were using to contact us thru the
chatwindow (either our registration page or our contact-info page). If
the problem doesn't resolve as a result, then...
3. Try disconnecting from the Internet and reconnecting, i.e.,
re-establishing your Internet connection (sometimes, connective
"flakiness" can disrupt or block communications via Instant Messaging).
And if this doesn't work, in desperation, you can reboot your entire
system.
4. If you're still having
problems after all this, then you can send an email to aoscentralemail
at airhitch dot org to let us know you're trying to contact us via
chat, and we'll put a microscope on the problem to try to determine if
it's on our end, or, to the
extent possible, somewhere in between us and you, and work back and
forth with you via email to make sure you are ultimately able to make
chat contact.
If you absolutely, positively have to leave before you get
a reply, then just leave your email address and our email staff will
reply to you in email; or, if you have an identity on any other IM
system (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, etc.) just tell us which one, and what
your screenname or contact name is, and we will find you the next time
you log on to it.
3. You did not properly edit your nickname for the chatwindow. As explained on the page you came here from, we have been having harassment and abuse problems and so
will not respond
to people who fail to identify themselves straightforwardly, as we take
this as a sign that their purposes in attempting to contact us are not
legitimate.
Suggested corrective action: Follow the instructions just above the chatwindow on the page you came here from, by editing your nickname below the window to your first and
last name as they appear on your student id, if you're a student, or,
if you're not, on your passport or whatever photo id you normally use
to board airplanes with.
NOTE: If you absolutely, positively have to leave before you get
a reply, then just leave your email address and our email staff will
reply to you in email; or, if you have an identity on any other IM
system (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, etc.) just tell us which one, and what
your screenname or contact name is, and we will find you the next time
you log on to it.