You ever have an F2F? In Internet-speak that's a Face-to-Face:
that first meeting with somebody you've connected with through
email or an on-line chat room. It's one of the main oddities
of doing business on the 'Net, that you usually don't have a
clue what somebody is going to look like, unless they've sent
you a picture. You can be utterly off-base about their age, race,
looks, size--sometimes even their gender. Which is what makes
the F2F so revelatory. Oh, not about them. About yourself, and
your expectations, the way you imagine people to be.
Well, I travel a lot so I've done a lot of them. I make a
conscious effort to meet people over a cup of coffee and chat
them up if I've liked them on-line. What I've discovered is that
in most F2F's there's this little blip of adjustment while you
revise your mental photo, but usually no huge surprises, and
even if there are, you can recover in a minute or two.
Usually. Until the afternoon I look up from the menu in a
cafe in a Sunbelt city and the physical reality of Trudy knocks
me half out of my head. (CONTINUES )
