CEBU, Philippines - Once upon a time, I was involved with someone I met online. It’s the bright and beautiful (and not to mention sane) future now, the period I assured myself would come when that particular romance was in the thick of not working out, and I can safely look back at that time almost a decade ago (gasp!) when the choices I made threw me into a crazy spin cycle that both lasted too short and went on for far too long.
I can think about it without being jaded now. I can talk about it with wisdom earned now. Most importantly, I can laugh about it now. So, last night, with sleep being elusive, I decided to retrace my steps to the early beginnings of my online life: I downloaded mIRC.
Raise your hands, those who know what that is! I bet you’re at least 27 years old.
Did you know you have to pay for mIRC now? Imagine that.
For those who don’t know, mIRC was the most popular Internet Relay Chat client for Windows. You can use it to connect to hundreds of differet channels on sever IRC servers. My server of choice was Undernet, because that was where my favorite chatrooms were: #up, #gulod, and #gaguhan. Early in our online friendship, Juan would look for me in those channels, and he would check on me and the channels I was on by using the command /whois.
I’d forgotten all the other commands, but visiting #up again last night, and finding the other channels I’d frequented to be abandoned, I remembered I could find other channels by typing /list.
It was a flashback of so many sleepless nights spent chatting in my mother’s room—with a dial-up connection that would break off if someone was calling our landline, no thanks to call waiting. Truth be told, the sound of a modem dialing and connecting still remains to be one of my favorite sounds of all time.
But I didn’t actually meet Juan in IRC. I met him through ICQ.
Raise your hands, those who remember what ICQ is! I bet you’re at least 27 years old as well.
I downloaded ICQ last night too—and my account was still alive! I may have to thank my gingko biloba supplements for helping me remember my over ten-year-old password too. The ICQ start up sound, still that old boat horn, made me feel like I was suddenly in a college reunion of sorts, even if none of my contacts were online. It was a pity I didn’t receive any message, though, because I didn’t get to hear the ICQ message alert sound (the one that goes, “Uh-oh!”).
But guess what my Nokia message alert tone is now?
The only software that remains of my not-so-secret-cyberlife is Yahoo Messenger, where Juan and I continued our friendship. At first, we would have mIRC, ICQ, and YM open. Then, it was just ICQ and YM. Then, it was just YM. Finally, it was just phone calls. And, to cut the long story short, it never went past that.
Last night, I connected to different English-speaking channels of different countries. A number of chatters from all over the world messaged me:
ctc?
asl?
Somehow, my fingers kept typing 23 f. Muscle memory from the last time I connected, I suppose. I had to remind myself, I’m now 33/f/Manila. I was amused to see that many of them in #up were also older—even older than me. I had expected to run into college-level teens or 20-somethings who still had a lot of time to waste on their hands.
Chatting, however, wasn’t as fun as I remembered it to be. I had forgotten all about weeding out perverts; about chatters who stopped talking to you if you said you had no picture or no webcam; about how difficult it was to be talking simultaneously to so many people who had nothing valuable to say, really, when taking a bit of time to reply would mean you were rude or uninterested, and they would say, “k, fine, ur bz. cu.”
Signs of the times, my friend. Signs of the times.
/quit This used to be my playground! (Insert annoying ASCII art here.)
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