#oneaday Day 729: The struggle for your emotions to be heard

One of the things I find difficult and, at times, frustrating to deal with, perhaps particularly as a person with an autistic spectrum condition, is properly conveying the emotions that I am feeling and the depth of those emotions. Our recent anguish over Oliver's disappearance is a prime example of this. I am feeling intense amounts of pain, sadness, anger, fear, grief and all manner of other emotions over this situation, on a pretty much continual basis, and yet I'm not sure if I have accurately conveyed that to anyone.

woman checking compass on trail — Photo by Ali Kazal on Pexels.com

It's not as if I haven't tried to do so. But I feel like any time I have attempted to — with the exception of my therapist yesterday, who is trained in such matters, and my family members, who have been through situations like this and thus understand — I have simply got a response that is, at best, a cursory "oh, Pete, I'm so sorry" and then nothing much after that.

I'm not really sure what I'm expecting or wanting from other people, to be honest. But something about it just doesn't quite feel… "enough", you know? I am here, devastated at the potential loss of a family member — because make no mistake, Oliver is a family member — and I feel like a lot of people I've expressed this to have pretty much forgotten this fact almost as soon as they have given the appropriate response as defined by the unwritten social contract we all agree to.

To be clear, I'm not angry at anyone who has responded this way and I'm not annoyed that very few people have reached out to see how I'm doing as the week goes on. I know that everyone has their own things going on in their lives, and their own priorities of things to care about. I cannot reasonably expect people who are not directly involved in this situation to care about it as much as I do. I know that.

But I think what the problem is, is that this is putting my overall loneliness somewhat into perspective. There simply are not very many people left in my life that I feel like I can express these things to, and that they will give a shit. It is at times like this where you really feel like you need people in your life to support you, to uplift you, to distract you from the dark thoughts swirling around inside your head, and when you simply don't really have that outside of your immediate family members, it can feel a tad difficult to deal with.

I think about how I might feel if someone close to me was dealing with such mental anguish, and how I would want to be there to support them. I think about how I have been with people who were once close to me who have been through similarly challenging periods of intense, sustained emotion. Perhaps I am the one who overdid it? Perhaps I was overbearing, smothering? I don't know. It felt like the right thing for me to do at the time, and the people in question seemed to appreciate it, too.

It's just so difficult. Like I say, I really don't know what emotion I am really "supposed" to be feeling right now, because the fact is I simply still do not know what the situation actually is. All I know is that Oliver is missing, and his condition is unknown. And until we learn something more about what has actually happened, that uncertainty is going to be probably the leading cause of the intense sadness and frustration that both Andie and I are feeling right now.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 513: Unnecessary replacements for things we already had a perfectly good name for

There's probably a more succinct way of putting that title, but in the interests of what I'm about to talk about, I thought I'd be perfectly clear. Today I would like to talk about the phenomenon, particularly in the "business" sphere, of completely unnecessary, arbitrary replacements for concepts and things we already had a perfectly fine, functional and clear name for.

My biggest bugbear in this regard is holiday. Time off work. Between these two terms, they cover pretty much everything anyone needs to know about you taking some time away from your job. "Holiday" tends to imply that you're going somewhere, while "time off" just suggests that you're not going to be working for a few days, for reasons that are, frankly, nobody's business but your own.

Both terms are, to me, interchangeable — I will use "holiday" for a single day off when all I want to do is bum around the house in my pants, and "time off" for a week away at Center Parcs. It doesn't matter. Both effectively mean the same thing, both are well-established words that we learn the meaning of at an early age, and there is no need for any other terminology to replace them.

So please explain to me why so many people insist on saying "Annual Leave" (or, worse, "AL"). Not only is this annoying business-speak, but it also feels inaccurate and dishonest. Because, to me, when you say something is "annual", you're suggesting it happens at the same time every year. So, instinctively, whenever someone says they're going on "annual leave", it suggests to me that they are going to do so at the exact same time every year. Which tends not to be the case. They are going on holiday, or having some time off work. There's nothing "annual" about it aside from the allowance they have for such periods of time off work.

Likewise, I also despite "Personal Time Off" or, more commonly, "PTO". "PTO" already has a meaning, and it is "Please Turn Over". In its fully spelled-out definition, it is unnecessarily specific. If you are having a holiday or some time off work, it is implied that is already "personal", because you have no obligation to share your reasons with your employer. As such, there is no need to state that you're taking "Personal Time Off". Just "Time Off" is fine.

It's all part of the obnoxiously insincere, obsequious way that people talk to one another in the workplace — the LinkedInification of language. It's the same concept that sees people starting the day or an email with "Good Morning Team" (or, worse, "Team,") rather than addressing you in a more sincere, personal sort of way. It's the same reason people say "Can you send me a full brief?" instead of saying "Please tell me exactly what it is you want."

If you know, trust and even like the people you work with, there is absolutely no need to communicate in this way. I would wager that office workers who address one another casually without resorting to business-speak at any point are, on average, significantly happier and less stressed at their job than those who speak like an AI-generated LinkedIn post. Because communicating clearly and in a way that expresses your personality is an inherently more honest way to be — and that, in turn, encourages you to be honest with your colleagues.

So fuck "Annual Leave". Go on holiday. Take some time off. Do whatever you want. Just be honest about it.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

2102: Seven Wonders

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "Seven Wonders."

"Khalil Gibran once said that people will never understand one another unless language is reduced to seven words. What would your seven words be?"

Regular readers will doubtless be aware that I require considerably more than seven words to get my point across in most situations, but this is an interesting question, regardless. What are the most fundamental things that you might need to communicate with other people? And, by extension, if those were the only things you were able to communicate, what effect might that have on your life?

A hasty answer to this question would consider fairly "obvious" words that reflect basic survival: food, drink, friend, dangerous, stop, help, run. Being forced to rely on words like that, though, would essentially put us on the level of primitive man: living for nothing more than basic survival and basic relationships with one another that boil down to people and things being good or bad. That, while a stable existence, would be rather dull.

So you could throw some words in there to spice things up a bit. Love. Hate. Sex. Kill. Although with those latter two in particular, you're still not really operating on a level anywhere particularly beyond that of the cavemen.

But with only seven words to play with, how on Earth can you hope to make yourself understood? How could you possibly express yourself in all the many weird and wonderful ways humanity does today? These two things aren't necessarily the same, since expressing yourself "clearly" does not necessarily mean that you're being understood.

Well, then, you have to consider that not everything about communication involves words. Humanity can communicate with eye contact, with body language, with physical contact, with visual imagery, with music, with sound, with empathy, with sympathy. Consider the works of art that you might have indulged in that have no words as such: silent movies, instrumental pieces of music, visual art, dance recitals, even video games like Flower and Journey.

When you think about it that way, do we even need words at all? Well, yes, I think we probably do, since expressing the fact that you're hungry entirely through a spectacular but ultimately impractical ballet performance is not really the most efficient way to go about things. But with the above in mind, what it does mean is that we could get by with a bare minimum of language to cover our basic needs — food, drink, friend, dangerous, stop, help, run, perhaps substituting "sex" for one of those depending on your attitude towards fornication — and the actual expressive side of communication could be handled entirely by non-verbal forms of art.

That would certainly be an interesting way to live, but to be honest, I think I like words too much to ever want to abandon them in that way. So don't worry, dear reader; tomorrow's post will be made up of more than the seven words I've proposed today. And I hope the words I choose will help you to understand me just a little bit more than the day before.

2044: No, Thank You

In response to The Daily Post's writing prompt: "No, Thank You."

"If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?"

I'm going to cheat a little here and not talk about a specific word, but more a general style of communication. There are numerous words that could be used to represent this style of communication, but not one that particularly stands out more than others, so I'm going to talk in more general terms.

As most of you know, the rise of the Internet over the course of the last few decades has made it easier than ever for people to communicate with one another. And with that ease of communication has come a relaxation of the rules of formality when communicating. In some ways, this is a bit of a shame, because the distinction between formal and informal use of language can often send implicit signals to the people in an interaction as to what is and is not appropriate to talk about. But in others, I'm actually very much relieved about this, because formal language is so mind-numbingly impersonal it's borderline offensive to be confronted with.

I'm thinking particularly in terms of "professional" email messages here, and I'll give you an example of the distinction. I've been doing some freelance work for a company for a while. When I started, the company was very much in its infancy, with relatively few employees and a single point of contact for the work I was doing. Said point of contact was a delightful young woman who was always chatty, helpful and charming whenever we spoke to one another. It was a pleasure to interact with her, even though for the most part we were only ever exchanging standard pleasantries and details of work assignments. But just little things like her squealing enthusiasm for me when I told her I was getting married, or chats about the extremes of weather we've seen this summer — all of those things were nice, and gave me a feeling of being "connected" to her and, by extension, a feeling of "belonging" to the company as a whole, despite simply being an outside contractor.

A few weeks ago, my former contact was replaced as she (presumably) moved on to other duties in the company as it has started to grow. She's still with the company and tends to get copied in on email messages, but I haven't heard a peep out of her since. Her replacements are like robots. And I mean that pretty much literally — every message I get from them absolutely stinks of copy-and-paste, email-by-template communication… largely because they clearly are copy-and-paste emails-by-template, and it's easy to tell this due to the fact that there are the exact same words in each one.

There's a good reason for this sort of thing, of course; as companies grow and have to communicate and collaborate with more and more people, it's not considered to be particularly efficient to manually type out each and every message. So in come the templates, the form letters, the copy-and-paste boilerplate text.

Efficient it may be, but that feeling of "connection" is gone as a result. I don't know these people, and even having sent messages to them in the same tone as I spoke with my previous contact, they've made no effort to engage with me in any way; I may as well be downloading assignments from an automated message board.

This is frustrating enough by itself, but combine it with the passive-aggressive tone that business communications tend to take — all "gentle reminders" and "looking forward" to something you haven't done yet — and it's not something that I feel is particularly conducive to a good working relationship.

It doesn't really bother me all that much, to be honest; the company in question is a means to an end (said end being "getting money") for me right now, and ultimately a personal connection with it isn't all that important to me. I just find it a little sad that what was once friendly, personal interactions between two people now feels like sending commands and requests to an automated system. You're human beings; act like it!

So, to (sort of) answer the original question, then: I would ban business-speak, form letters and email templates from general usage and insist that everyone communicate with everyone else as an individual. It would help make the world just a little bit friendlier as a result, and I feel that would work wonders for making people feel more positive about all sorts of things.

1545: Changing Communication

I'm trying to make a conscious effort to tone down the effect the Internet has had on the way I communicate over time. This may sound like a peculiar thing to say, given that the majority of the communication I engage in on a daily basis is via the Internet, but just recently a number of things have really started to bug me about the way people talk to one another online, and I simply want to make sure that I'm not a part of it and thus, perhaps, inadvertently annoying someone else.

I think the chief thing I want to make sure I avoid is excessive hyperbole. Most people who use social media have been guilty of this at some point — posting a link to a mildly amusing cat video and declaring "Shut the Internet down. We're done." or "This is the best thing ever!" or "There are no words." or… I could go on, but I won't. You get the idea.

Declaring things "the best thing ever" or along those lines is excessive hyperbole. It devalues that phrase "the best thing ever" if everything is the best thing ever, and the other examples are just putting undue pressure on something that was probably designed to be a throwaway joke to perform and be somehow amazing.

Particularly gross examples of excessive hyperbole come in the form of headlines from sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy and their numerous imitators. Inevitably conversational in tone but capitalised excessively So They Look Like This And You Won't Believe What Happened Next, these headlines, on an almost hourly basis, promise laughter until you evacuate your bowels, crying until your eyes shrivel up and stories so heartwarming you'll cook yourself from the inside. And they're rarely anything special; at best, they're sob stories deliberately designed to emotionally manipulate the reader; at worst, they're pointless nonsense deliberately designed in an attempt to make them "go viral".

Excessive hyperbole can spill over into discourse, too, and it frequently does. I've lost count of the number of times things have been described as "toxic" over the last year or two, when in fact this is, in many cases, an exaggeration. (Well, of course it is; if it was literally toxic then it would kill anyone involved.) And once you jump onto your high horse and brand something as "toxic" there's really nowhere to go from there; the people who disagree will disagree forcefully because you were forceful in the first place, while the people who agree will look like wet lettuces if they decide to come in with a "Well, I wouldn't say toxic, but…". Thus online discourse frequently descends into who can be the most hyperbolic the loudest or the most often, and the quality of discussion suffers enormously as a result.

Last time I wrote about this sort of thing I attracted commenters accusing me of something called "tone policing", which is where you distract attention away from the core argument that someone is trying to make by focusing on the way they are making it rather than the content. And that, perhaps, is something that people including myself do do, but if it's becoming an issue then perhaps the people who are getting "tone policed" should consider the way they are making those arguments in the first place. With less hyperbole, less use of strong, emotive language such as "toxic" and more in the way of constructive, descriptive comments, we can all get to know the way we feel about things a lot more easily, and we can move forward in debates and discussions.

As it stands, however, the second someone jumps onto their high horse with a disproportionately passionate reaction to something that is, in many cases, very simple, I simply cannot take them seriously. And I doubt that's the effect they want to have with their arguments.

I certainly don't. Which is why I'm making an effort to tone down my own hyperbole and try to speak like a normal human being when communicating on the Internet as much as possible. With a text-based medium of communication like the Internet, you have a moment to pause before you respond to or broadcast something to look back on what you've written, reflect and decide whether that's really what you wanted to say. Things said in the heat of the moment are often regretted with hindsight; those regrets can be easily avoided with a little less hastiness and a little more consideration, both for yourself and for others.

This was a Public Service Announcement on behalf of the National Hyperbole Authority, the best thing to happen to language in three thousand years.

#oneaday Day 989: Blackout

I was all set to write something profound tonight, then the Internet died and I'm relegated to blogging from my phone.

All right, I didn't have anything hugely profound to say and even if I did I could clearly still say it from my phone, but the Internet has gone down, which is, as everyone thoroughly immersed in 21st century living knows, incredibly annoying.

Given its prevalence in our everyday lives, it's very easy to forget what life without the Internet was like. Something as simple as checking the news or finding out what time something was on TV relied on you having… oh, it's back. I'll return when I finish watching this episode of The World God Only Knows. Ja ne!

… … … …

20 minutes later…

There we are, that's better.

Shit, now there's pressure on me to write something meaningful. Umm…

Nope, I got nothing. And fuck all that Internet talk. I've written that exact same post at least five or six times already in the last 989 days.

I finished watching Welcome to the NHK today. The last few episodes were major-league Feels territory. It was a fascinating show, all-told, that I may write about in more detail at some point in the near future. What I particularly liked was that it wasn't particularly easy to pigeon-hole into a specific category of genre. It had elements of comedy, drama, romance, surrealism and all manner of other stuff too. On the whole it was quite an emotional experience for me — I'm not sure how much it would resonate with someone who couldn't relate to some of the issues therein, but I certainly found it to be an excellent, worthwhile, enjoyable and moving watch.

Tonight, as I mentioned earlier, I've started watching The World God Only Knows after recommendations from several people. I'll blog in more detail about this when I've watched more than two episodes, but it seems to be highly entertaining so far.

The premise, for the unfamiliar, is that dating sim addict Keima inadvertently enters into a contract with the unfeasibly cute and broom-wielding demon Elsie to help round up "Loose Souls", runaway spirits that hide themselves inside the hearts of girls. Keima is thus tasked with making said girls fall in love with him, thus releasing the Loose Soul for Elsie to catch. Keima, sadly, is more than a little socially awkward, having spent all his time dating 2D girls rather than interacting with real people. However, since reneging on the contract means that both he and Elsie will be decapitated by the magical collars placed upon them, he has no choice but to go along with the outlandish plan. Consequently, he attempts to use his knowledge of dating sim tropes to figure out girls in the real world and, of course, Hilarity Ensues.

I've watched two episodes so far and already I want my own Elsie to hug. Certain characters just nail the whole adorableness factor, and she has this particular characteristic in spades. The show as a whole is rather endearing, too, though, regularly lapsing into heavily-stylized and chibi sequences rather than trying to remain too grounded in reality. The concept is, after all, ridiculous, so rather than trying to take itself too seriously the show appears to very much embrace its silliness. I'm fine with that, and am looking forward to exploring the rest of the episodes.

Anyway, on that note I think it's probably time I hit the sack. Hopefully tomorrow will see a more coherent entry and less in the way of Internet outages.

#oneaday Day 517: Social Peril II: The Periling

As a social network, Facebook is arguably becoming less meaningful — that is, from the perspective of encouraging meaningful interactions with one another. This, I feel, is in part due to how cluttered it is these days — cluttered with people, cluttered with businesses, cluttered with applications. I long for the simplicity of the site as it was when I first joined it, when it didn't even have a chat system and friend requests required you to indicate how you knew the person — kind of what LinkedIn does nowadays, only with people actually talking to each other instead of using phrases like "blueskying" and "monetization".

A fine example comes up if you look at the Facebook Page for any social game, ever. You can pick any random example and this will happen. Look at something the producers of the game say, then look at the community comments. You might have 25% meaningful discussion (a somewhat optimistic estimate — if the game is popular you can reduce that down to less than 5%) and 75% people just going "add me". This also happens on App Store reviews for "multiplayer" (and I use the term loosely) games.

It's not just that, though. Posts on Pages vaguely related to Xbox/PS3 will bring the fanboys for both camps out in force, ranting and raving at each other and not even addressing the point that was made in the original wall post — burying any meaningful discussion amidst the usual spray of bile, hatred and testosterone.

Beyond that, though, a lot of the trouble lies with the changing way people use Facebook nowadays. When it was a simplistic, app-free system, people used it to communicate. People would write a status, other people who knew the original person would comment. People might post a link or a photo, people would comment. Simple, effective. Now, though, with the fact that everyone and his dog has a Share to Facebook button, this simple clarity of communication has been almost completely lost. You get the occasional aberration where a topical post can bloom into an interesting discussion between friends, but soon enough it's lost in the never-ending cycle that is your News Feed, devaluing the interaction until it's gone, forgotten, meaningless.

The simple answer is, of course, to adapt. Realise that Facebook is not about permanence and the long-term, it's about the here, the now, the narcissistic. "This" is happening right now, so you share it. Here's a photo. Here's my new Bejeweled Blitz high score. I'm playing a game with farms in it. I took a quiz to determine which colour from the Dulux range I "am". PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

Facebook's new Messages system doesn't help, either. Muddling your chats in with your actual messages is a dumb idea, because the sort of thing you write in a message is typically lengthier than what you write in a chat. And then it all gets jumbled together, so if you had a message thread with some meaningful information in it followed by a chat with said person about how much you heard they like cock due to whoever just facejacked their profile, then it becomes nigh-on impossible to find anything useful.

I'm not too concerned about the whole thing, though, to be honest. Facebook does what I need it to for now, which is to allow me to share links to my articles and work to people who might be interested or might not have another means of finding out about them, and occasionally proving to be the most reliable means of contacting people. As such, I'll likely keep my profile there, but my usage of the platform is at a bare minimum these days, as I don't feel like it's really for me any more. Twitter, on the other hand, still does everything I need it to and still remains pretty much as pure and clear as it was the day I started using it. Let's hope it stays that way.

(In other news, I had a lovely weekend away, as you may have surmised from that last post. Thank you to Andie for making it happen!)

#oneaday Day 137: Say My Name, Bitch

I have something of a — what — phobia? I'm not sure it's that serious, but I have something of a thing about saying people's names, for some inexplicable reason. It might be something to do with the fact that I never really liked my own name or the way my voice pronounced it when I was a kid (hence my habitual shortening of it to "Pete" everywhere in the world these days) or it might just be one of my many strange and inexplicable neuroses.

I can't even pin down why I sometimes find it difficult to say the name of the person who is standing right in front of me and who, in most cases, I know quite well. Perhaps I worry I'll mispronounce it (granted, it's kind of hard to mispronounce most of the names of people I know, though I have no idea how to say the surnames "Ohle" or "Honea" to this day and worry if I ever meet the people in question face to face I'll pick the wrong possibility and make a big tit of myself) or perhaps I just think that someone's name is somehow a window on their soul, a piece of their person that is, well, personal.

I don't mind people calling me by name, though, that's the weird thing. And I'm aware it's silly to feel odd about saying other people's names — particularly if you're calling out for someone. "Hey! You!" really doesn't cut it in a room full of people — although to be honest, I've never really been one for calling out anyway, as I generally much prefer to just go over to the person in question and speak to them, as yelling just draws attention to 1) you and 2) the person you're yelling at, who may not be grateful for the attention.

Of course, it's easy to go the other way and start calling people by their name far too much. Then it gets a bit weird, people start raising their eyebrows and wondering why you're "acting suspiciously". Saying someone's name too much is often seen as a sign of guilt, like you're trying to avoid accidentally referring to the person as someone else, like an ex, or a hilariously deformed person you saw on TV that you can't get out of your head while you look at your friend, however awful a person that makes you.

Maybe it, like so many socialisation things, is something you just need to practice a bit. It is, after all, one of the things about "growing up" — the moment when you stop calling adults "Steven's mum" or "Mrs. Stevenson" and start calling them "Geoff". (Steven's mum's parents didn't like her much.) Perhaps there's still some sort of residual hang-up in my mind about that, like so many things.

Ah well. One more to add to the list.

#oneaday Day 60: Just Imagine...

Not so long ago, the world was a different place. Saddam Hussein was still in charge of Iraq, no-one knew who the Liberal Democrats were and Call of Duty was but a twinkle in a young Bobby Kotick's eye. Sounds like delightful times, doesn't it?

Well, the other thing about these glory days is the fact that we didn't have the Internet. And these days it's easy to take that fact for granted, given that most of the things we do throughout the course of every single day involve the Internet somehow, from the smallest little things to huge, life-changing events.

It wasn't always that way, and oddly enough it's a piece of educational software that really drives the difference home. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? was a game that tested your geographical knowledge and encouraged you to find out about the wider world. And you had to do it without the aid of Wikipedia, a website which means you can rattle through the Facebook version in a matter of minutes. Sure, it was often necessary to use reference material to pass the game's missions, but there's something a little different about using an encyclopaedia or atlas to find things out rather than typing things into Google.

For me, though, there's no going back to those dark days. I think about all the people I have in my life right now, and I bet over half of them are in my life because of the Internet, whether it's directly or indirectly. Some people I initially met face to face and then ended up getting to know via email or IM chat sessions. Some people I met online first and then met face to face later. Some people I've only ever met online, but want to meet face to face. And a few people I know online and am more than happy to keep them at a very long arm's length!

It's difficult to imagine how the events of the last year would have gone without the Internet. For starters, the situation wouldn't have arisen in the first place, for many reasons. But let's assume it had for a minute; the people from whom I had the most support were people I knew because of the Internet. A couple of them happened to be physically close to me, but a lot of them were on the other side of the planet. How different would it have been without them?

Perhaps if there was no Internet then I'd have more friends who are physically close to me. But then would that lead to a "compromise" sort of situation, where you hang out with people you don't really like because it's convenient?

Who knows? All I know is that I'm pretty damn grateful the Internet exists, and I'm equally grateful that the people I know because of it exist. You rock, so keep being awesome, and on that day when I win a bajillion pounds on the Inordinately Generous Lottery for People Called Pete (which doesn't seem to have started yet, sadly) I will be travelling around the world to meet each and every one of you, buy you a drink and/or call you "dick-tits" to your face.

#oneaday, Day 30: Julia

The Internet is a curious thing, as we all know. It's given us LOLcats, cakefarts, puddingfarts (so I'm told… I haven't dared look that one up yet), Twitter, Rickrolling, gayrolling, that kid throwing a WoW-related (fake) strop and jamming a controller up his arse, porn, dancing chicken man, leekspinning and all manner of other things besides.

The other thing it gives you is people.

As a kid at school, I often wondered what it would be like to meet people outside the local community where I lived. I grew up in a small village in the countryside that had a pretty close-knit community. You could probably name most of the local "characters" off the top of your head if you had a good think… largely because pretty much everyone got involved with everything. And, just to add to every country stereotype ever, there was even a semi-regular "village show" which was inevitably filled with middle-aged men and women making jokes that were smutty and/or at the local vicar's expense. It's pretty neat to see a close-knit community like that, actually, though I question how much it actually happens these days. It probably does, though I doubt to the same degree.

I remember when the Internet came to town, though. Or, more specifically, in the form of CompuServe, which wasn't the "proper" Internet—that was a mysterious and difficult thing that no-one quite understood at the time. CompuServe was a window onto the rest of the world; people who were potentially far away that we all had access to for the first time.

CompuServe had one of the earliest chatrooms around—this was so long ago that the term "chat" hadn't taken on the widespread meaning it had today. No, in keeping with the times (or possibly not), CompuServe elected to call their chatroom facility the "CB Simulator". You know, because it was like CB radio in that you could talk to random strangers. Only it was completely different because you were just typing things.

I remember "meeting" a few people through this facility, with one in particular springing to mind. Her name was Julia, and she was from somewhere near Manchester. We got chatting and hit it off pretty quickly, and thus began a long campaign of emailing each other back and forth. I can't remember any of the things we talked about—the usual teenage things, I imagine—but I remember that we were getting on well and it felt like we were pretty "close".

So eventually, we had the opportunity to meet. She was going to Alton Towers with her friends, and as it happened, my friends and I were planning a similar trip. So we decided to make our trips coincide. I was pretty excited about the whole thing. She'd sent me a couple of (clean!) photos which seem to have managed to travel from computer to computer with me completely unintentionally, and she hadn't promptly cut off all contact when I sent her a photo of myself looking slightly uncomfortable in a dinner jacket on prom night. Which was a good sign.

I'm not sure what happened. Perhaps it was shyness, perhaps it was the presence of all our other friends "cramping our style", perhaps it was the fact that one of my friends was hitting on one of her friends (and doing quite well, from what I could tell), perhaps I wasn't what she'd expected or hoped for (she totally was what I was hoping for, she was a hottie)… but we found it pretty difficult to talk to each other in "real life". It was weird; we'd told each other lots of things, including plenty of "secrets", but as soon as we were faced with one another it was suddenly like starting over… and it became a missed opportunity, sadly. We drifted off and lost contact after that. There was no "breakup" or words spoken in anger; things just… "stopped".

I think about Julia every so often and wonder what she's doing with her life. I hope she's happy, wherever she is.