Bugged

I see a lot of (software) bugs. I find some, I fix some and I live with the rest (not knowing that they exist, lurking in the dark somewhere ... ready to jump at me when I least expect them). :-| Good, that was dramatic enough. I'll start my story.

I hate having unread messages in my inbox. I read email, mark items as read or I trash things that I don't need. Nothing extraordinary there. I'll add that I open my email from more than one computer and I also use email apps on my phone. Yes, yes I am being slightly prissy here (after all that is how we have to be when we deal with bugs).

I did pretty much the same things yesterday - opened a few new messages from my laptop, deleted some without opening them, marked one or more messages as read, opened a few emails from my phone and then I noticed the bug! There was one unread message which was not visible in my inbox. I call such bugs ghosts, so lets call this the gmail phantom (or the black sheep ?! Phantom this time, I'll use black sheep in some other post ;) ).

I searched my inbox, refreshed the page several times, signed out and signed back in, but nothing helped. So I slept on it :) and tried something different this morning. I searched for a tweak online and discovered something interesting. There's this nice search field that lets us search within gmail. Type "is:unread" there and hit search, voila! - you get a list of unread messages (including unread messages from the trash folder). I saw a couple of random messages that were trashed, but I found nothing from the inbox. Anyway, I marked the whole lot as read and my problem was solved.

All I know is that some list didn't get cleared correctly, how and why it happened are beyond my capacity to fathom (without any logs). When I searched for all the unread items, the phantom too came along and I killed it. I hate such bugs, you don't know where they come from but they bug you to no end. :angry frown:

There was another invisible bug that I saw a few weeks back. I couldn't become invisible on gmail chat (the Google Talk that's linked to gmail) even after I signed out of all other sessions (I was signed in on my laptop, a desktop and a phone). Apparently, this was a bug that many mobile users have faced and I tried a remedy that someone had posted in a forum. I signed out, uninstalled the app on my phone and reinstalled it. That did the trick. I don't remember clearly, but I think I was able to turn invisible after I uninstalled the app. Anyway, the end result was that I stopped using that gTalk account on my phone. Actually, life's more peaceful now.

I see similar bugs on Facebook. Sometimes notifications get lost or I see the incorrect number of likes and comments on some posts (mine / my friends'). Later, these bugs go away. But as I said, there's a whole bunch of evil bugs in this planet; love them, hate them, you just can't ignore them! Adios!