Our Meeting Story

One of my favorite blogs is called "Creating Passionate Users." I find lots of good inspiration there for the part of my job that involves technical training. The blog's author occasionally posts something off topic but interesting. Yesterday I found this post asking for web/personal stories. She was looking for stories about people whose lives had been positively affected by the web.

If you know Walter and me you know we met online a long time ago. Now I think that's a pretty positive outcome! I couldn't resist - I sent in our story. For those of you who don't know it, I share it here too:

My husband and I like to say we met on the Information Superhighway when it was but a dirt road. We first connected when we were both members of CompuServe in 1984. For many years they had a feature on CompuServe called CB Simulator. There were different channels you could go to and talk (type) to people. It was much like chat on the internet today. We were casual friends at first, then grew into very close friends. Things turned romantic in 1986. We communicated by email, but also by phone. The phone bills were astronomical! I remember a couple in the $800 range. Yes, that's for a month. Thank goodness long distance rate plans have changed since those days of AT&T.

Walter came to Seattle to visit me in person for the first time on August 31, 1986. He was living in Lexington, Kentucky at the time. A couple plane trips back and forth for each of us, and he moved here to Seattle in February 1987. We married August 29, 1987 and have been happily married ever since - that will be 20 years this year!

Walter is legally blind and I think it's quite possible our paths would not have crossed if it were not for CompuServe's online services. Walter still has the same email address today that he used when we first met.

Okay, that's your romantic story for Valentine's week.