Monday 13 July 2009

Three things must you know ....

Last week I saw one of the real benefits for the World Wide Web.

I'd lost contact with a good school friend some time ago and despite joining Friends Reunited I've had no luck tracking him down. OK, I guess I could have tried a few more things but at the end of the day I'd no idea if something had happened to him or whether life just got in the way but I stopped getting Christmas cards and the like some 10 years before.

Then I decided, following a suggestion from a friend at work, to try and Google him. Well .. he did have an fairly uncommon name, I knew he worked in 'electricity' and I knew he was based in the South East of England ... well ... the latter two were true 10 years ago anyway. So, armed with these three pieces of information I tried it.

On the first Google page was a link to a website from one of the major electricity suppliers ... based near Bexleyheath ... OK ... maybe I'd struck lucky.

I emailed the guy with an, 'I've lost contact with an old schoolfriend' email ... and waited.

And didn't have to wait long before I got a reponse.

I'd struck lucky .... he was OK .. his family were OK ... great news all round and a happy ending.

So ... the internet does have it's uses after all.

But with every silver lining is a cloud and now I worry about the livelihood of all those private detectives who used to pay their bills with missing persons cases ....

4 comments:

  1. Outstanding! Glad you found your pal.
    Great Tin Tin pic,the internet is one of the finer thing to happen to mankind and just wait till it gets sentient....(;

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  2. Ah .. there you go ... now I'm worried ... I still have the power to switch it off though !! ... it does stay off when I go to bed doesn't it ? Maybe I need to sneak in and check it after I pretend to go to bed .. damn ... it'll know I'm going to do that now that I've typed it in here .... hmmm.

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  3. Hey, my internet stopped working earlier and I tracked it down to somewhere near this blog. Did you turn it off Dave?

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  4. Aha .. such is the extent of my power ... and there I was thinking that I only had the ability to mess up my own internet connections .. bwahahahahaaaha.
    When's RO going to actually be in the stores .. I was on hols .. a week in Southport .. and I must have popped into their Waterstone's store about twice a day ... sometimes dripping wet .. in my swimming trunks holding a bucket and spade ... damn ... I can't wait ...

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