Erasure

Last week, while working on a parcel where I was to place Trompe L’Oeil’s new Seaside cottage I noticed the inventory folder where I used to keep all my furniture, houses, potted plants, prim food, walls and fences, pavers and boardwalks, gazebos and whatnot relatively well organized was missing. Initially I thought I had mistakenly moved it and placed it inside another folder (by accidentally dragging it to another location), as it has happened before, but a quick search proved me wrong. Then I thought SL was misbehaving, as usual, and the folder has gone temporarily unavailable due to some error (a friend of mine claims to have experienced that in the past). I logged off and then logged back in several times, even with three different viewers, to see if that would “unblock” the folder… but it didn’t show up either. I tried other tricks I found on the Internet, what other people in similar situations had tried before with or –more frequently– without success, and again, nothing happened. Several attempts later, and with no positive results, I just quit, resigned.

Almost two weeks after waking up to that nightmare, I stopped trying to figure out what erased six years of records of my virtual doings. It is clear the exercise is futile: what’s already lost, forever is gone.

When you think SL is purely a “computer” world, you can think of hundreds of fixes to this mishap, from tools to perform automatic backups of your inventory (even paying a fee to LL for storage) to methods to quickly recover deleted objects (again, maybe even paying LL a fee for the minuscule hassle). I have a vague idea of reading somewhere that’s actually the way copybotting was born, though, so that may well explain why such tools don’t exist or aren’t allowed in SL anymore. All that remains is to think of this misadventure as the virtual equivalent of a RL natural disaster of which you have no control at all, like a hurricane or a tornado that wipes out and sweeps away all your belongings in an instant. I even imagined all my furniture flying up and up a gruesome funnel accompanied by Dorothy and Toto, and landing several hundred sims away. A phenomenon like that doesn’t take inventory of your possessions to find out what’s more valuable to you and then skip it, nor selectively picks up miscellany only. It blows everything away and leaves you in limbo, not knowing what to do or where to go.

Yet, I have to be grateful and express my sincerest thanks to Winter Thorn, of what next?, Kriss Lehmann, the Botanical guy, and Elle Kirshner, of Second Spaces, for helping me to recover some of the loses right after the accident. Winter uses a redelivery system in her store, so I was able to get back the things I have bought from what next? in the last two years without disturbing her at all. I had a problem with two products that wouldn’t deliver, though (they showed up on the list, but the redelivery didn’t come out), so I contacted Winter and told her what had happened and asked her if she could check the thingy out. She did that and went even further: she sent me a copy of every single product I have ever bought from what next?, both from the inworld store and the marketplace. Kriss was incredible too. When I contacted him I was hoping he could send me the products I bought from Botanical during the Summerfest 2013 event, a mere two weeks before (yes, those were gone too, and the items from The Garden event as well). Instead he sent me a notecard detailing everything I had bought from Botanical during the last year and then some, and asked me if I needed all of that back. And Elle, she even accepted a picture from this blog as a proof of purchase of one of my favorite Second Spaces products ever, because I didn’t have the proper transaction history details from SL website. You guys are awesome!!!

I guess there’s always something positive to be learned even from a bad experience, so here are few things I’m now more aware of, for your consideration:

• Consider buying from stores that have some redelivery system implemented (for copyable products only, obviously). In its absent, at least see if the store owner has a customer-friendly redelivery policy. Why? Because, in case of disaster the redelivery system will let you get a new copy of a previously bought item without disturbing the store owner, or in the case of existing a redelivery policy only, you could ask the shopkeeper for help with confidence. Of course, it doesn’t mean you should ignore the rest of the market, but stores with redelivery systems care more about their customers (that’s a guess).
• If your favorite store has no redelivery system, encourage its owner(s) to implement one. You may need to give him/her some convincing reasons of why that’s a good idea, like having happier customers or a simpler/more effective customer service department, perhaps? It may be that they prefer if you buy the product again, not because that would be easier, but because that’s how they earn their living, you know. So you may encounter strong resistance that way.
• In case of trouble, it may be reason enough to ask for help if the missing product costs 300L, 500L or 1000L, but hell, it’s faster if you simply buy that 25L or 50L item again, don’t you think?
• Copy/Mod objects are the best. I always try to buy copyable objects because I’m always rebuilding things, and it’s easier to select all objects at once and click delete rather than going one by one and taking them back (I’m lazy, I know). Now there’s a more practical reason to keep buying copyable items: they are the only candidates for redelivery. Non-copyable but transferable objects are a one time buy, and you know that, so don’t be silly and ask a shopkeeper to redeliver trans products.
• Every 30 days, make a backup of your Transaction History, from the Second Life’s website. Ages ago, we had access to a longer transaction record, but at some point LL decided we didn’t need that, and so now there’s only a month of data available at all times. If you need help, the store owner will ask you to prove you bought the object in the first place (logical, no?).

There are a few questions that now I ask myself regarding SL stores and redelivery systems. Since I never thought about this before (being the first time I have had to use them), I wonder, for instance:

• If some stores have redelivery systems, why is it that the rest do not? Is it something difficult to implement? Is it costly? Is it too much trouble?
• Why is it that the Marketplace doesn’t have a redelivery component for copyable products? Again, is it something difficult to implement? Is it not worth it? Is it too much work for the computer to handle? Would that be too much to ask from LL?

Finally, here is a list of a few buildings and furniture stores with redelivery terminals (that I’m aware of). There are no landscaping/gardening stores in this list because I didn’t lose any of my greenies (they are safe in a different folder) but undoubtedly that’s something I will check as well.

• what next?
• cheeky pea
• PILOT
• Trompe L’Oeil
• POST – though there’s no sign or mechanism in store
• Breno
• Kuro
• Dysfunctional Designs
• TIA
• Barnesworth Anubis
• Fanatik
• Mudhoney
• End of Daze

You’ll keep seeing their products showcased in this blog because, after this incident, they have won my gratitude and trust just for having that simple script active. To the rest, I would like to encourage you to emulate these nice fellows and use a redelivery system as part of your regular customer service. Maybe most clients won’t be using it, and that’s nice, but if it doesn’t hurt to have one, why not?

{ In the pictures } House: Trompe L’Oiel’s Seaside Cottage (available at Collabor88 right now). || Trees: Lilith Heart‘s Wildwood giant oaks forest and shrubs. You may have been seeing those big oaks for a long time now, being basically the Wild Oaks that have been in the market for two years now, but they have been reworked and arranged in mesh modules to create impressive forests, with roots, ferns, saplings and floor bases. If you already have the old oaks, maybe you can skip this release, but if you want lots of details, then this is an essential package.