(no subject)

Is anybody here familiar with the vagaries of Gmail? It's deleted most of my contacts and won't let me add any new ones. The biggest problem is that a friend I usually chat with during the day now can't see me. It looks to me like she's offline, and it looks to her like I'm offline. We can't figure out how to connect up.

Anybody know what happened or how to fix it? I can't even find a help function for Gmail. It seems to me that there must be one, but I can't find it.