Yahoo! Mail and chat

I've been using Yahoo! web mail since 1999 or something around that.
There was a time when it was slow and bloated and Internet connections
were slow. At that time, first browsers that allowed to block images
were a bless. Later, when Firefox came out and we were able to "block
images from xyz site" it was really good. They soon replaced those
with flash ads, but those were even easier to circumvent, either using
flashblock or not installing flash at all.

However, ads are not what's bugging me. It's the stupid new "Chat &
Mobile text" box on the left side. I don't want to chat, I want to
read e-mail. Google Mail has a similar feature for some time, and it
was driving me mad because it would change the size of the box at some
point and move rest of the page below it, making me miss some clicks.
Anyway, Google was smart enough to remove it (or allow us to remove
it, I can't remember).

But Yahoo! seems to be a different story. The box just stays there,
presumably drawing my bandwidth with some AJAXy calls. I have to press
Cancel for it to stop. EACH TIME. This is really annoying. I search
the options, and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off.

I understand that some people would like to chat while they are
reading e-mail, but I'm not one of them. Why would I want anyone to
know I'm online while I'm reading the e-mail. Can't I just read my
e-mail in peace and quiet?

BTW, Facebook is plagued with a similar problem. As soon as you are
logged in to read other people's updates, someone of your "friends"
might jump in to chat with you. So, the only way to work around this
issue is to ignore them? How nice is that?

Just let me be non-existent until I'm ready for the world...