... we probably wouldn't have kept up the conversation.
Back five years ago, there was undeniably something captivating about ICQ. The ability to be in immediate synchronous contact wih someone from the other side of the earth ... well, that's pretty much what the internet was about.
This particular encounter started when at work my ICQ flower started blinking,
and the small talk started. The picture in my mind of this encounter has blurred.
(I did mention this contact years ago, though I didn't
go into the details, and I can't really vouch for whether they were true even
then). She was a housewife in New Zealand, probably about twenty years younger
than me. We didn't seem to have much in common - she liked Elvis Presley, for
instance. And she tried to enlist my aid in solving crossword puzzles. She was
elated to discover that it was simple to click over to online dictionaries and
thesauri in order to find answers to those puzzles. I mentioned that New Zealand
fascinated me because from looking at the map I saw that it should be easy to
watch the sunrise over the ocean in the morning, and then drive to the other side
of the island and watch the sunset over the ocean in the evening of the same day.
This didn't excite her, and after about two weeks of perhaps ten minutes of conversation
a day she stopped saying hello.
Go to: Logical, but not the only, or
Go to: Strangers on a network.