An interesting development. (long)

OK, this gets complicated, so bear with me. I’ve mentioned before that I have an active virtual life. I co-administer a message board (some people call them forums) that is devoted to nothing in particular and serves as a place for people to talk to each other. It’s better than a chat room because it allows people from all across the globe to converse with each other regardless of what time zone they’re in. Messages are posted to the board, and other people respond to them at a later time when they have the chance to stop by. There’s also quite a bit of “real time” interaction on the board as well, though it doesn’t move nearly as quickly as chat room get-togethers tend to.

There is a small core of “old timers” on this board. We met on another board that shut down under strange circumstances. When that happened, one of us opened a personal forum, and we started meeting there, occasionally bringing in new people we’d met in our web travels or, more rarely, friends from real life. The result has been to make for a most unusual grouping of quite intelligent people. Over the two plus years we “originals” have known each other, most have relaxed our guard. We’ve shared personal names, addresses, sometimes made trips so we could meet one another, and been there during personal tragedies and successes. There are two original posters who remain a mystery to me, however.

One of these prides himself on being an enigma, and seldom comes by the board now. The other, however, is still an active member of the group. He’s quite an eccentric, adopting for himself a variety of names and personalities as the mood takes him. He was, more than likely, voted class clown in his senior yearbook. I know for sure only two things about him, he’s male and he’s married. All else (such as his purported age of 85) remains a mystery.

I had a strange little “episode” with this character about a year and a half ago that made me somewhat suspicious of him. At that time, I was running my own spin-off forum rather than co-administering the main forum. This character posted to my forum that he had used his “special powers” to divine my real name and that of another person who posted there. He was wrong about the other person’s name, but dead on with mine. Two others (who knew my real name) e-mailed me in a panic to tell me what he’d done, and I deleted his post from my board. I never confronted him about it, and he in turn never acknowledged that the post was deleted. (Since the board we were on at the time had a habit of “losing” posts, he couldn’t have even been sure that it was deleted, or if the board had just messed up saving it.)

I had dropped enough information on myself on the board that it was just possible he had gathered it all up and done some on web research. I went back, collected things about myself that I’d said on the board during the prior few months, and did a web search using those facts. Sure enough, a hit with my complete name did come up, in a place I never would have suspected. Had our “class clown” been checking up on me for some reason? Or had he just made a superlatively lucky guess? I didn’t know which, but I knew what the odds against guessing my first name were. I have been very careful around this guy ever since – still friendly, but unwilling to drop any more “critical” information on the board about myself. Instead, I confined true confidences to e-mails.

Now we move up to the recent past. A few weeks back I downloaded Microsoft Instant Messenger at home. I did this mostly because it contains a feature that alerts me each time that a new mail message arrives in my inbox. I don’t know anybody who uses IM to talk with other people, but I loaded a few people who I knew had Hotmail accounts to my “buddy” list so I could see how it worked. One of the people was our eccentric. Then, perhaps a week ago, he loaded Instant Messenger to his own machine, and I received a notice that he was on-line. I really haven’t figured this IM thing out yet, so I’m not entirely sure who contacted whom, but we ended up chatting for a while.

We had the usual silly off-the-wall discourse that we’d usually have on the board. And then we had a couple of discussions the days after that, all of no import. Last night, while I was getting ready to scan pictures from my Boston trip, he hailed me. Again we talked of goofy trivialities, but one thing led to another, and he started talking about “special mental powers” that run in his family. I took the opportunity to confront him, asking him if that was how he’d managed to get my name all those many months ago.

He was completely taken aback. He claimed to have absolutely no recollection of what I was talking about, and he sounded sincere. He denied knowing anything about me, and (to paraphrase him) said he was merely doing his goofy, unpredictable act and happened to guess right. He then threw out a bunch of name he considered silly, including the name he’d tried to assign to the other board member! Interestingly enough, my name did not come up on his list of silly names (although that would have been a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” thing for him to make if he really did know my name).

I think I believe him. He seemed genuinely distraught that not only was I suspicious of him, but that two other regular posters to our community knew about this incident. He asked me if I believed him when he said he had no idea who I was, and I had to be honest. I told him I was 90% sure, but that it was still a hell of a coincidence that he happened to hit my name like that.

Talk then wandered to a diary he’s keeping here on DD. (Yes, he was inspired to start his own diary, which is an absolute hoot and which I recommend to everybody here) He’s been reading other diaries, and observed that most of them seem to fall into certain categories. He then wondered why people would post certain things in a public place like this, where somebody could recognize them and be hurt by some of the revelations. Warning bells started going off in my head. I made the comment that names were usually disguised, and that it was quite possible that people he knew posted to DD, but that he’d never recognize them because their diary lives would appear so different from their outward, everyday lives. He agreed to this almost too readily.

So does he know me or not? Has he spotted Salamander’s diary? If he wasn’t sure before, he is now. Which is basically what I intended. The next move is up to him.