Those "ASL" Days

Today when my cellphone beeped, it was my friend from college asking if there was anyone in the group of 10 people who could field the question. Suddenly, I reminisced the sounds of "Knock" and "Shutting of door". These two things had been like the beeps of the cell phone then.

In early 2000's, Internet was acknowledged for chatting and Yahoo, ICQ, MSN messengers were the Facebook, Twitter and G+. Yahoo! and Hotmail were competing head to head for users and Yahoo was giving 25 MB of free storage compared to a meager 5 MB from Hotmail. I recollect these from the past:-

1. "ASL?" - (Age, Sex, Location) was how conversations started 90% of the times. People were averse talking to same gender.

2. Usernames were very catchy - Sexyboy2000, smarty86, cuteprincess_18. A friend had made - "MC_BC_UC_IC@....com".

3. In the chatrooms, there would be one user who would force everyone to hear the song that he/she was listening to on his machine.

4. Most users usually had fix timings of staying logged in. You could find them during that interval in the same chatroom.

5. Every messenger had some irritating "Buzz!" which was to grab the attention of the participants. Most of us would use it several times one after the other.

I guess I was in 4th or 5th class when I joined a chatroom. There were some who were discussing about games and other topics in the main window. I didn't understand many of the shortforms they used and so I would ask the same. So then, this person PMed(private message) me. As I was new to chatting, I would immediately add anyone who sent a message. She was 60/f/US.

Slowly we started talking regularly and more so because this user was online most of the time. She would help me with all Internet related stuff (voice chat, ICQ etc).  Since its very usual for us to refer to any elder women as "aunty", she found it very cute. I was too young to understand what was cute there.  We became great friends. I often taught her hindi words, she would help me understanding american phrases. Im sure I voice chatted too but dont remember anything specific. Yes, once I asked her the meaning of F word and she said I need to stop talking to such people :). Everytime after the school, I would log in and we would have something talk about. It would usually begin with what I did at school.

A few months later, I tried to login but was unsuccessful. In those days, the server wouldn't always connect you. After several attempts, I was sure it wasn't that. The dialog box said that Yahoo! won’t allow anyone below 13 years! I couldn’t even log in from the web interface. They had deleted my account.

Later, I created another account but didn’t remember her username completely. I tried looking in various chatrooms but no "cookenciel....." was found. Even  couldn’t help me.  And this is how I lost my first online friend.