On Disappearing:

Only two reasons I avoid:

Maintaining friendships with some types of people.

I have repeatedly found myself defending why I'm not around, AKA online whenever the person/people in question wanted to talk to me. Over and over and over.

So, two reasons:

1.) If it's somebody who is disrupting my work, trying to distract me from it or basically shitting on the vast majority of my ideas, I may disappear to get away from that.  When you get bombarded too much, it's pretty normal to want to take a breather since this allows you to think a little more clearly.

2.) I'm a STUDENT.  We spend time STUDYING STUFF!  Like, FOR TESTS.  Which are REQUIRED.  It really helps with things like, say, GOOD GRADES.  So in fact, I may actually be doing student things, which can lead to being tied up in research or needing some time to myself.
If it's important, people do know how to reach me.  Seriously, I don't just go AWOL without making allowances for emergencies. Key words here are "important" and "emergencies." 

I have a phone, email, and this page here. This is not exactly a total off-the-grid situation where, I don't know, someone would have to start up a fire and get busy sending smoke signals.

I do remember somebody getting mad that I didn't make a superb effort to talk to her at length every single day.  Well, I didn't mean to upset her, but things do come up.
Another person got mad if they saw me spending any time with other people who weren't them. Then I had to draw a line in the middle of their rant and explain that I was spending time with the other people because those "other people" were folks I was discussing an idea with for a project.  You know, fellow students, teachers, etc?

It bothers me, this notion of being constantly connected and always available, be it through the internet, cell phones, what-have-you.
Sometimes you're trying to talk to specific people about specific stuff, which with me often involves school; and you don't want to be torn away from that to deal with somebody else being mad at you because they think you aren't paying enough attention to them at that exact moment.
Not to mention, sometimes you just don't want to talk to anybody because you need some solitude to work on something that's complicated. These are not evil things, or they weren't before instant gratification via being constantly plugged in resulted in people thinking that not being immersed at all times was wrong, even socially offensive.

I even had one person who couldn't get used to the idea that I wasn't around to chat when I was AT SCHOOL IN CLASSES.  Right, yes, because clearly the student thing is a cover story.  I must really be living in my parents' basement with a Matrix-style jack directly into the back of my skull (btw, would so not want to get a computer virus from one of those).
He got sort of paranoid and kept trying to "prove" that I was signed into my regular IM program as Invisible, when it was really just that I was logged out or not online. The way I'd find out that he was doing that would be when I finally did get out of class or finish work, I'd sign into my email and there'd be yards and yards of increasingly angry "messages that were received while you were offline."
To liken this to something "in RL," think of it as being at work or at school and having people fill up your voicemail and/or your answering machine with increasingly angry messages, all insisting that you must really be home and you need to pick up RIGHT THAT SECOND!!!1!!
This would not be considered socially acceptable behavior--in a way, it's a type of harassment.  So why is it considered OK just because it happens over the internet?  It still involves a type of verbal harassment that escalates in tone.

Sometimes I have to disappear, from anywhere from a few days up to a whole week or more at a time if I get embroiled in something exceedingly complicated. It's one of the perils of being friends with somebody who studies science and research for a living.

These people who would get mad would always choose right near my finals week or if I was doing a term paper to do their blowups. It's the damnedest thing. It would consistently happen, whether I had repeatedly told them that I was trying to study or not. If I said that I was trying to study, they'd insist that studying was irrelevant, or try to make it my fault for not signing out.  Of course, if I had signed out, then I would have gotten a ton of offline messages demanding to know why I wasn't online.  Lose-lose situation.
I do try to be patient and explain at first, but at this point it's like, YOU DON'T OWN ME. Get back to where proper boundaries are or eff off.

The other ugly thing about arguing online is when the other person insists what they are doing (religion, school, career, hobby, etc) is real, but what you're doing...well, it just isn't important on any level, according to them. And then, satisfied that they've made their points, the person goes "I'm going to bed!" and then signs out leaving you to puzzle out just what the hell they were mad at you about in the first place--that, or unable to explain your side of things because you'd be just talking to yourself.
(Because, well, talking to someone through your computer who's offline is pointless.  BECAUSE THEY ARE OFFLINE.)

One last creepy thing that sometimes people do is  passive-aggressively wait and stalk you in your IM list on stealth the whole day.  Essentially, they wait until you sign in unawares to check your inbox, flip to online, and blast you away about whatever it is that they are mad at you about (sometimes in caps--only ever had that happen twice but it's a surefire way to a quick block and delete and never being spoken to again ).

Here's a thought--if you can't behave like a decent, rational human being in public, you probably can't behave like one online.  Not to mention, some people have way too much time on their hands to spend stalking and harassing others-- and maybe they shouldn't be given a computer...

(Edited by Mary this week who is made of awesome... Go see her blog The PMS Project. DO IT).

Update 10/23/11: It said you can't use the icons from the other site externally without permission, so I removed them.