Back in my pre-marital days when I was young, dumb and full of… more energy… I met more than one romantic prospect online.

There was Wally, a fellow BBS SysOp who asked me out after we spent several weeks chatting online. In those days, when modems maxed out at 9600 baud, a person could spend an entire evening at the computer chatting with perfect strangers and still have exchanged only one or two paragraphs worth of text. Maybe that’s why my “Loser Alert!” didn’t warn me to steer clear of Wally, who brought a gift for me the first — and only — time we met for drinks: a slinky black silk pegnoir. (And, no, I didn’t accept it.)

Then there was the guy I’ve dubbed the Floridian Psycho. We met when we were both working as programmers for a MUD that used to run on AOL. Our jobs required a lot of online interaction with each other, along with several phone conversations to discuss some of the hairier aspects of a joint project we were assigned. He never bothered asking me out, which was a relief since I was rather spooked by his obsession with Dungeons & Dragons and insomnia-induced 2 a.m. phone calls. Turns out, he didn’t consider it relevant whether I was interested in him or not. So, after getting my address from our employer, he booked himself a flight and took a cab from the airport to my apartment only to find out that I wasn’t even home. Not that he let such details stop him — after jimmying the lock on my front door, he waited for me in the living room where I found him wearing nothing but a big smile and my fuzzy bunny slippers. Pity he never told his wife and kids where he was heading. I handled that for him, shortly after the police left that night.

Not surprisingly, I gave up online dating after that. This guy ought to, too.

A love-struck Frenchman wooed the online girl of his dreams for six months – only to discover at their first meeting that he had in fact been chatting up his own mother, Yahoo! reports.

This nightmare scenario (for Daniel Anceneaux that is – as far as we’re concerned Xmas has come early) began when the Marseilles X-Ray technician came across a fellow internet lurv-seeker called Sweet Juliette.

A shaken Anceneaux takes up the story: “Mum called herself Sweet Juliette and I called myself The Prince of Pleasure, and unfortunately, neither one of us had any idea who the other was. The conversations even got a little racy a couple of times.

“But I really started to fall for her, because there seemed to be a sensitive side that you don’t see in many girls. She sent me poems she had written and told me about her dreams and desires, and it was really very romantic.

Indeed. When the proto-Romeo asked for a snap of Sweet Juliette, she sent him a “curvy, half-clad cutie she’d scanned from a men’s magazine”. Anceneaux recalled: “The girl in the picture was so beautiful, I begged Juliette to meet me on the beach – and mum said yes. Mum says she was falling for me, too, and she just wanted to meet me, even though she knew I’d be disappointed when I saw her.”

Disappointed doesn’t even begin to describe it. Anceneaux continued: “I walked out on that dark beach thinking I was going to hook up with the girl of my dreams. And there she was, wearing white shorts and a pink tank top, just like she’d said she would.

“But when I got close, she turned around – and we both got the shock of our lives. I mean, I didn’t know what to say. All I could think was, ‘Oh my God! it’s Mama!’.”

It gets better. A policeman then turned up and “cited them for visiting a restricted beach after dark”. Mum Nicole confessed: “Danny and I were so flustered, we blurted out the whole story to the cop.”

Nicole said: “The policeman wrote a report, a local TV station got hold of it – and the next thing we knew, our picture and our story was all over the 6 o’clock news. People started pointing and laughing at us on the street – and they haven’t stopped laughing since.”

And what did dad make of all this? Well, Paul Anceneaux “wasn’t too happy when the story hit the news and his beer-drinking friends made him the butt of their jokes”, Daniel admitted. “Dad was angry for a while and he banned mum from talking to anybody on the internet ever again,” he concluded.

(Source: The Register.)

How very Oedipal.

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005, 11:49 am   |   Technology Bites  |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.