sweetisu

I wrote an entire post and thought I had published it, turns out I didn’t even save it before closing my computer. How annoying. Well, here’s my 2nd attempt.

I was first introduced to the Internet in my freshmen year of college. I was immediately addicted. I spent hours on end at the 24-hour lab, using IE 1.1 and pine and among other archaic applications. Later on even got paid as a Lab Monitor (to watch over the lab and computers, keep printer paper supply, etc.) below my dorm room for some months. Then someone told me about Internet Relay Chat — IRC. To someone who talks with an ever so slight accent (but very self conscious about it) and someone who’s intimidated by groups bigger than four, this was heaven. No one would hear my stumbling over words and I can type and retype until I’m satisfied with it before hitting ‘enter’ to send.

This was 1995.

All was well. I was ‘talking’ to people, making new friends both female and male, and I didn’t need to go to some party and inhale second hand smoking to do that. I was enjoying it a lot. Most of the people I talked with were also universities students who had way too much time to spend before their stay-up-all-night for that cram-study-session the night before the test. It wasn’t really anonymous since you can /whois someone and it will usually show their university email account and therefore get pretty much anything you’d wanted to know about them from the online student phonebook. Back in the days I didn’t think much about anonymity.

Then one day, when I came back from class, there was a guy waiting for me at my dormitory hall. We had chatted a few times on IRC but nothing really personal at all. I was more than shocked to say the least, and scared. I’ve never given out my name or phone number, let alone my address. This guy went to another university 2 hours away and decided to look me (and another female friend of mine at my school) up and just came to visit! As nice as I was, I took him around campus for a short tour and then it was lunch time and I didn’t have much choice but to take him to the dinning hall. After that, he still didn’t give any indications that he was leaving at all. I told him I had a test to study for and fled.

It was a really scary experience. Fortunately since then, I have met numerous wonderful people from the Internet, and many of them remain to be good friends. I even married one of them.